[tex-announce] Apr19 TUG news: accessibility grant, season of docs, conferences, ctan

[TeX Users Group]

Dear TeXers,

April brought us some exciting news.  The Gordon and Betty Moore
Foundation, https://www.moore.org/, generously gave us a seed grant
(US$10K) to develop accessible technologies for TeX.  According to the
agreement with the grantee this money will be spent on (1) fundraising
(that is what 'seed' means in the grant) and (2) travel grants to
developers.  I'd like to stress that none of this money will be spent
on TUG:  as a matter of principle we do not charge overhead for the
earmarked donations.

As many of you already heard from Mojca Miklavec, Google has started
accepting applications for organizations that want to participate in the
"Google season of docs", offering stipends to technical writers to work
full time on improving documentation of open source projects; see
https://developers.google.com/season-of-docs/docs/project-ideas. If you
want to participate and want TUG to be the mentoring organization,
please write to Arthur Reutenauer <arthur.reutenauer at normalesup.org> and
Will Robertson <wspr81 at gmail.com>, who are working on a list of ideas.
The deadline for complete applications is April 23, so please be very
quick.

Speaking of deadlines, our friends at GUST extended the application
for BachoTeX till April 10: http://www.gust.org.pl/bachotex/2019-en
TUGboat also has extended the deadline for the first issue of 2019 - you
might catch this train too in the next few days.

The deadlines for TUG2019 in Palo Alto (August 9--11),
https://tug.org/tug2019/, are also coming quickly:
* May 1 - bursary deadline (https://tug.org/bursary)
* May 15 - presentation deadline (early submissions greatly appreciated)
* June 1 - early bird discount registration deadline

The 13th ConTeXt meeting in Bassenge, Belgium, will take place
September 16--21, 2019;  see https://meeting.contextgarden.net/.
Registration will be open on May 1.

In other news TeX Live is close to its 2019 release - with a number of
interesting features; feel free to try the pretest at
https://tug.org/texlive/pretest.html. Last year's release (2018) is
frozen and won't be updated again.

As usual, there are a number of new packages on CTAN:

* beamer-rl, right-to-left presentation with beamer and babel
* do-it-yourself-tex, a collection of easily modifiable forms, macros
  and sample texts for use with plain TeX/XeTeX
* els-cas-template, for typesetting articles for Elsevier's Complex
  Article Service (CAS) workflow
* fbox, extended \fbox macro 
* fiziko, a MetaPost library for physics textbook illustrations
* icite to produce from BibTeX or BibLaTeX bibliographical databases the
  indices of authors and works (indices locorum citatorum)
* latexalpha2, embedding Mathematica code and plots into LaTeX
* xcpdftips, natbib citations with PDF tooltips
* zootaxa-bst, a BibTeX style for the journal Zootaxa

Happy TeXing!

Boris Veytsman, TUG President