[tex-announce] May17 TUG news: BachoTeX, Brazil, PracTeX, ConTeXt

[TeX Users Group]

Fellow TeX-ers,

This is my first TUG newsletter as TUG President.  I am honored to
serve this great community.  Thanks for the welcoming letters and good
wishes!

According to our traditions the newly elected Board members and officers
started their duties at the TUG meeting, which took place during
BachoTeX'17.  The weather in Poland in May was unusually cold, but the
conference in Bachotek was very warm.  Many interesting talks,
discussions, even songs around a bonfire.  BachoTeX is a yearly event,
and definitely one deserving attending.  Thanks to Jerzy and GUST for
their hospitality!

I am also happy to thank Paulo Ney de Souza and many people on the TUG
Board, notably Jim Hefferon, for their efforts to make TUG'18 happen as
a satellite conference of the International Congress of Mathematicians
in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.  This was recently approved by the ICM, and
is a huge win for our community.

So TUG'18 is officially set for Rio, from July 20-22;
our Annual General Meeting will take place there as usual.
https://tug.org/tug2018/ will have information as it becomes
available.

This will be the second consecutive TUG conference outside North America,
and the fourth outside the US.  We are therefore considering holding a
Practical TeX conference stateside in 2018, and will make announcements
in due time.  Special thanks to Michael Sofka in this regard.

Another important event later this year is the 11th International
ConTeXt Meeting in Maibach, Germany, September 11-17, 2017:
  http://meeting.contextgarden.net/2017/

TeX Live 2017 is close to release (see https://tug.org/texlive/pretest.html
if you'd like to help test), with the usual variety of changes and new
features.  Many come from new releases on CTAN, including a TeX
implementation of the Gotoh sequence alignment algorithm (the author,
Takuto Asakura, won the prize for the best talk at BachoTeX'17), a Babel
package for Azerbaijani, a new package to create exams in LaTeX, and
many others.

It is a good time to be a TeXnician!

Happy TeXing,
Boris Veytsman