Feb23 news: conferences, election, lucida, books, tugboat, ctan

[TeX Users Group]

Dear TeXers

There are two major conferences planned for 2023. First, TUG23
(https://tug.org/tug2023) will be held in Bonn, Germany, July 14-16,
with a developers' tagged pdf workshop on July 13.

The TUG23 deadlines are approaching:
  - April 1, 2023 - deadline for hotel reservations at our group discount.
    Booking your hotel room early is highly advisable. Availability and
    rates are not guaranteed after April 1.
  - April 10 - deadline for abstracts for presentation proposals
    (early submissions greatly appreciated).
  - April 10 - bursary application (financial assistance) deadline.
  - April 15 - deadline for early bird registration discount. Early
    registrations are greatly appreciated!
Also, if you need to fly to Bonn, you might want to book your airplane
tickets early.  There are indications that people have started to
resume travel, and flights are filling up.

Second, we are happy to see that GUST has decided to have the popular
BachoTeX conference this year (https://gust.org.pl/bachotex/2023-en),
to be held from April 29 through May 3.
The topic of The 28th GUST TeX conference is:
  A model kit.  Modeling and implementing text typesetting in TeX and
  other systems.
The deadline for regular abstracts and other proposals is March 26th,
and the deadline for final papers to appear in the conference materials
is April 16th.

2023 is an election year for TUG (https://tug.org/election). The terms
of President and eight other board members are open. The deadline for
nominations is March 1, 2023.

In other news, TUG has released the new version of Lucida OpenType fonts
(https://tug.org/pipermail/lucida/2023-January/000921.html).  If you
bought your copy from us, you are entitled to a free upgrade.

The books section of the TUG site (https://tug.org/books) has two new
reviews: Do Not Erase: Mathematicians and Their Chalkboards, by
Jessica Wynne, reviewed by Jim Hefferon; and the fourth edition of
Stop Stealing Sheep by Erik Spiekermann, reviewed by John D Lamb (the
latter book is available under a CC license for no cost).

The first TUGboat issue for 2023 is coming together. Submissions are
welcome (https://tug.org/TUGboat/location.html); the deadline is March 26.

New CTAN packages in January:
- expkv-bundle, an expandable key=val implementation and friends
  (replaces several expkv* packages);
- gfdl, support for using GFDL in LaTeX;
- jwjournal, a personal class for writing journals;
- lparse, a Lua module for parsing key-value options;
- naive-ebnf, EBNF in Plain Text;
- overarrows, custom extensible arrows over math expressions;
- pixelarttikz, work with PixelArts, with TikZ;
- scrabble, commands for Scrabble boards;
- tangramtikz, tangram puzzles, with TikZ;
- tikzviolinplots, draws violin plots from data;
- tlc3-examples, all examples from The LaTeX Companion, third edition;
- tramlines, a package for creating tramlines (lines above and below a
  title used by lawyers in the UK)
- uol-physics-report, a LaTeX document class for writing lab reports;
- writeongrid, write on grid lines;
- zennote, streamline your note-taking process.

Happy TeXing!

Boris Veytsman, TUG President