[tex-announce] December 2014 TUG newsletter: membership campaign!

[TeX Users Group]

Dear TeX users,

Maybe you use TeX and friends in your work, or maybe you appreciate
the beauty and power of the systems, or maybe you just like working
with systems that are free for everyone, but the availability of TeX
and friends matters to you.

To continue to thrive, and to grow for the future, TeX needs support.
This includes support for the maintenance of the current releases -- the
software that you're using now -- and for the continuing progress of
actively-developed systems such as XeTeX and LuaTeX. For thirty-five
years the TeX Users Group (TUG, http://tug.org) has been a key part of
that support.

Lately TUG has seen a slow but perceptible drop in membership.
We depend on members for everything, including the financial basis
to help keep TeX and its related systems strong.

If you are not already a TUG member, please consider joining. See
http://tug.org/join for a list of benefits, and for the online
enrollment form.

If you are already a member then we are very grateful -- and we want to
ask you for something else: we hope you can help in a new membership drive.

The full description is at http://tug.org/membership/ but the idea 
is simple. We call it "members bring members". We ask current members 
to invite new ones and the form now asks, "Who invited you to join TUG?"
If a new member lists you then you will receive a thank-you gift: an 
exquisite letterpress notecard made specially for this campaign by 
long-time TUG member Peter Wilson. In addition, at the end of 2015 you 
will be entered in a drawing to win an original illustration by Duane
Bibby, the artist who created the art in The TeXbook, and many other
works, both TeX-related and otherwise.

So, if you are not yet a member, please join at http://tug.org/join if
you can. If you're already a member and think of someone who also values
TeX and friends, please encourage them to join. It will help keep the
systems strong. Thank you.

Happy TeXing,
Steve Peter, TUG President 
for the TUG Board

P.S. If you can help spread the word about this drive, and about TUG in
general, by posting to a related blog, or social media, that'd be great.