[tex-announce] Jan19 TUG news: publications, meetings, memberships, ctan

[TeX Users Group]

Hello TeXers,

I. Publications and fun.

In December, the New York Times published a glowing profile of DEK,
which described TeX as one of his most prominent achievements:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/17/science/donald-knuth-computers-algorithms-programming.html.

Another recent publication about TeX was the paper by Barbara Beeton,
Karl Berry and David Walden in the IEEE Annals. We mentioned it in
TUGboat 39:3, however, due to rearrangement of the IEEE web site, the
link changed. The correct URL is now
https://www.computer.org/csdl/mags/an/2018/03/index.html. The current
link, as well as related material, including preprints for the TeX
papers in that and the forthcoming issue, is maintained on Dave Walden's
TeX history page: http://walden-family.com/ieee/texhistory.html.

Those who have not yet seen the 2018 Christmas TikZ extravaganza are
invited to watch the video at https://vimeo.com/305374856.

II. Meetings.

Now about 2019. We have several meetings planned for the year. Of course
there is TUG'19 in Palo Alto, California, USA, August 9-11, 2019:
https://tug.org/tug2019/. The TUG Annual General Meeting will be held
during the conference, and a LaTeX workshop will be held (concurrently)
on the first day. Some deadlines for TUG'19:

May 1  - deadline for bursary applications (https://tug.org/bursary).
May 15 - deadline for abstracts for presentation proposals.
June 1 - deadline for early bird registration discount.
July 9 - deadline for hotel reservations at our group discount;
         booking your hotel room early is highly advisable.
July 15 - deadline for preprints to be in the printed program. 

Please submit proposals and register for the conference any time!

Other upcoming conferences in 2019:

March 27-29, 2019: The 60th DANTE meeting will take place
at Hochschule Darmstadt, Germany, 
https://www.dante.de/events/dante2019.html.

Sept. 16-21, 2019: The 13th International ConTeXt meeting, in
Bassenge-Boirs, Belgium, http://meeting.contextgarden.net.
The theme is dirty tricks & dangerous bends.

III. TUG memberships.

January is the time to renew your membership. If you have not done this
yet, please do! https://tug.org/join.html has all the links and info.
Rates are unchanged from last year. (Members with automatic renewals
will be processed soon.)

There will be a TUG election in 2019: info and forms are at
https://tug.org/election. The (firm!) deadline to receive all nomination
materials is March 1, 2019, 7am US/Pacific time.

We are always especially glad to see new members. We are repeating our
lottery for all new members throughout the year. For 2019, the prize
will be the full set of Lucida fonts (or another font set if the winner
already has them).

The 2018 lottery was for the book A Century for the Century: Fine
Printed Books from 1900 to 1999, by Jerry Kelly and Martin Hutner
(http://www.godine.com/book/a-century-for-the-century/).

Herbert Voss recently released the luarandom package
(https://ctan.org/pkg/luarandom). I thought it might be interesting to
use it to determine the winner of 2018 lotterry. Unfortunately,
Herbert's package does not yet allow setting the seed of the random
number generator, so we cannot get reproducible results: the seed is
hardcoded as math.randomseed(os.time()) -- consider this as a feature
request for the package. At any rate, the following lines
   \makeRandomNumberList{1}{133}{1}
   \getNumberFromList{1}
determined the winner among 133 new members: #99, who turned out to be
Geoffrey Shiflett. Thank you to all our new members, and congratulations
to Geoffrey!

IV. CTAN news.

Finally, CTAN was busy during the holiday season.  Among the new packages:
- beamerauxtheme, supplementary outer and inner themes for beamer
- chordbars, typeset chord grids for pop/jazz tunes
- crimsonpro, the CrimsonPro fonts with LaTeX support
- econ-bst, a BibTeX style for economics papers
- fascicules, create mathematics books for secondary schools
- iodhbwm, an unofficial template of the DHBW Mannheim
- lstfiracode, typeset listings with Fira Code font
- luarandom, create random numbers with LuaLaTeX
- makecookbook, typeset cook books
- memorygraphs, TikZ styles to typeset graphs of program memory
- multicolrule, make decorative rules between columns
- pkgcheck, a CTAN package checker
- pst-venn, for Venn diagrams with PSTricks
- xindex, Lua program to generate Unicode indices 

More information about all CTAN packages is at https://ctan.org/pkg,
and TUG's home page is https://tug.org.

Happy TeXing!
Boris Veytsman (TUG President)