[tex-announce] Jan18 TUG news: birthdays, fonts, memberships

[TeX Users Group]

Dear TeXers,

This January Don Knuth turned 80.  The birthday celebration was held in
Pite\o{a}, Sweden (http://knuth80.elfbrink.se/).  Here is the
congratulatory address from TUG delivered by our Vice President Arthur
Reutenauer:

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One of the key notions of Aristotle's ethics is aret\=e.  It combines
moral virtue and generosity with excellence and living to one's full
potential.  It is difficult to imagine anyone closer to an
embodiment of aret\=e than Don Knuth.  He is not just one of the fathers of
modern computer science and engineering, he also has set an example of
a kind, generous and moral intellectual.

For us, the TeX community, it is important to stress Don's striving
for beauty and harmony in all his endeavours.  His determination to
make TAOCP beautiful in both its contents and its form gave us an
incredible typesetting system, together with fonts and font definition
algorithms.  It is Knuth who showed us that beautiful thoughts must be
beautifully explained and beautifully typeset, which is the
fundamental principle of our community.  Thus his influence goes much
further than his algorithms and theorems.

Aristotle linked aret\=e to eudaimonia, the human happiness, harmony
and goodness of life.  We congratulate Don on his 0x50 birthday and
wish him many years of good and happy life.
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%

To continue the topic of our gifts for the occasion, I'd like to mention
that Bigelow&Holmes and TUG gave a free copy of the Lucida DK fonts to
the participants at the celebration.  (The rest of us can buy the fonts
from the TUG store: http://tug.org/store/lucida/opentype-dk.html.)

Another remarkable birthday this month was the 100th (yes, the 100th)
birthday of Gudrun Zapf von Hesse.  On this occasion her first alphabet,
Hesse Antiqua, was released in digital form after seventy years:
https://www.fontshop.com/content/hesse-antiqua.  At this url one can
also find her short biography and great photographs.

We started a new year: a good time to renew your TUG membership and to
urge your colleagues and friends who use TeX to do it too.  TUG
activities are financed by you and other TUG members.  We have some
additions and changes in our membership forms and options
(https://tug.org/join.html).

1.  There is an experimental trial membership for users who are
    TUG-curious but cannot yet decide to make the plunge.  It is open
    only to new applicants, who never have been TUG members before, and
    consists of a full TUG membership for one year at US$20.  We offer
    it at a loss: the dues are lower than the physical cost of shipping
    TUGboat and TeX Collection DVDs.  If you choose this option and
    decide TUG membership is valuable enough, please consider a (tax
    deductible in the US) donation.  And, of course, we hope you will
    renew in 2019!

2.  All new members in 2018 will get a letterpress-printed postcard
    *and* will participate (unless declined) in a lottery for a book by
    Jerry Kelly and Martin Hutner, A Century for the Century: Fine
    Printed Books from 1900 to 1999.

3.  I would like to note that enabling auto-renew on your membership
    form makes your and our lives easier in 2019 and beyond.


Happy TeXing!

Boris Veytsman (TUG president)