[tex-announce] Oct 2003 news: TeX Live/CTAN, TUG'04, devfund process, Proj. Gutenberg

[tug-news at tug.org]

Dear TeX folks,

Latest batch of TUG news, FYI ...

1a) Production of the TeX Live discs (both CD's and DVD) is
essentially complete.  We hope to receive TUG's shipment within a
couple of weeks; we will then send the software to all 2003 TUG
members, and make them available at the TUG store
(http://tug.org/store/).  See http://tug.org/texlive/ for more
information about this year's edition.

1b) Production of the CTAN CD set will be a little longer yet.
As mentioned before, since the TeX Live DVD will include CTAN,
the CTAN CDs are being produced (and distributed) separately.


2) TUG 2004: An International Conference on TeX, XML, and
Digital Typography, will be held in Xanthi, Greece, Aug 30-Sep 4,
2004.  See http://tug.org/tug2004.  A registration form will be
available at the web site soon.

------------------------------------------------------------
CALL FOR PAPERS: please submit abstracts (by email to
mailto:tug2004 at tug.org) as soon as possible, and full papers by
February 1, 2004.  The organizers have the ambitious plan of
making the proceedings available at the conference, and doing a
"preproceedings" volume of preprints earlier in 2004.  So early
submission is needed and appreciated.
------------------------------------------------------------

The preproceedings will be sent to all individual TUG members for
2004 as the equivalent of a TUGboat issue.  It will contain all
the conference papers, fully edited.  The final proceedings will
be produced as a hardbound volume in Springer-Verlag's
prestigious LNCS series (http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/), and
will be sent to all institutional TUG members.

Although this is an unprecedented arrangement, we felt that the
increased exposure of TeX via the publication in LNCS justified
it.  All TUG members will still receive the full proceedings
(albeit in different formats).


3) To make the TeX Development Fund (http://tug.org/tc/devfund/)
process more responsive, we've decided to begin accepting
applications on a rolling basis, as long as funds are available,
instead of having a fixed deadline.

In practice, TUG contributes to the development fund at the
beginning of the year, so January is still the best time to
apply.  However, since the development fund has received generous
contributions from so many individuals throughout the year (for
which we are *very* appreciative), we felt we could act on
applications as they come in, instead of having a due date.


4) Distributed Proofreaders (http://www.pgdp.net/) is the
main source of public domain electronic books.  It is part of
Project Gutenberg (http://www.gutenberg.net/).  The project needs
savvy (La)TeX folk to correct OCRed texts, especially of math
books.

Thus, if you have Internet access, a browser, and a spare ten
minutes now and then, you can make a significant contribution to
mathematics.  The finished e-books are free, downloadable, and
computer-searchable.  Sign up at the web site,
http://www.pgdp.net.


Finally, and as always, please don't hesitate to contact us for
any reason.


Happy TeXing,
Karl Berry (president),
on behalf of the TUG board.