From tug-news at tug.org Thu Jan 9 00:15:59 2020 From: tug-news at tug.org (TeX Users Group) Date: Wed, 8 Jan 2020 16:15:59 -0700 Subject: [tex-announce] Jan20 TUG news: conferences, TeX merchandise, dek interview, ctan Message-ID: <202001082315.008NFx70031370@freefriends.org> Dear TeXers, I hope the holidays helped you to recharge and become ready for the new year - the last one of the second decade of this millennium. For those who missed this year The Great Tikzlings Christmas Extravaganza, here is the link: https://vimeo.com/380684973. In 2019 TUG returned to Silicon Valley for the very interesting meeting in Palo Alto. We had many exciting talks (see the Proceedings at http://tug.org/TUGboat/Contents/contents40-2.html); DEK was among the guests. The next meeting is scheduled for July 24 to July 26 (Fri-Sun), 2020, at RIT, Rochester, New York, USA with a calligraphy workshop by Kris Holmes and Lorrie Frear on July 23. The conference website is https://tug.org/tug2020/. Online registration and other information will be available soon. Hope to see you in Rochester! Other events: - DANTE meeting, Universit\"at zu L\"ubeck, Germany, March 25-27, 2020; https://www.dante.de/veranstaltungen/dante2020 - G21C---Grapholinguistics in the 21st Century, CNRS Michel-Ange, Paris, France, June 17-19, 2020; https://grafematik2020.sciencesconf.org/; Submission deadline: January 13, 2020 - 14th ConTeXt Meeting, Prague-Sib\v{r}ina, Czech Republic, Sept. 6-12, 2020; http://meeting.contextgarden.net/2020 We are accepting submissions for the next issue of TUGboat. The deadline is March 31; see https://tug.org/TUGboat/ for information. In other news - we now have a Redbubble presence at https://www.redbubble.com/people/texusersgroup. For a long time people have asked about t-shirts, posters, mugs, stickers with TeX logos and art - and now you can order them there! Thanks to Robin Laakso, Pavneet Arora, and Karl Berry for setting up things. We are going to add artwork to the site. If you have TeX-related images or examples of beautiful typesetting you can share, please contact me at president at tug.org. We have additions on our main site as well: the updated list of museums of typography at https://tug.org/museums.html (thanks to Barbara Beeton). Axel Retif found this episode of AI Podcast with Lex Fridman, where Lex talks with DEK about Algorithms, Complexity, Life, and The Art of Computer Programming: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BdBfsXbST8 New CTAN packages in December: - apa7, formatting document according to APA style (7th edition) - barracuda, a modular Lua package for drawing barcode symbols - biblatex-jura2, citation style for the German legal profession - clara, a serif font family - domitian, a drop-in replacement for Palatino - erewhon-math, Utopia based OpenType Math font - parsa, a XeLaTeX package for theses and dissertations at Iranian universities - pmdb, create a DB (PDF) document for selecting content to include in other documents - qualitype, forty five fonts by QualiType - sdaps, LaTeX support files for SDAPS (optical recognition for exams, etc.) - TeXLab, a LaTeX language server for completion support - xecyrmongolian, basic support for typesetting Cyrillic Mongolian documents using (Xe|Lua)LaTeX Happy TeXing! Boris Veytsman, TUG President From tug-news at tug.org Wed Feb 5 03:01:54 2020 From: tug-news at tug.org (TeX Users Group) Date: Tue, 4 Feb 2020 19:01:54 -0700 Subject: [tex-announce] Feb20 TUG news: TUG'20 @ RIT, accessibility, merch, ctan (quote) Message-ID: <202002050201.01521sYc009157@freefriends.org> Dear TeXers! This year February has one extra day -- maybe it is these 24 hours that we need to finish all the tasks postponed since the beginning of 2020. One of the things you might want to do is register for TUG2020 (https://tug.org/tug2020/). We have found a great location at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), the home of the Cary Graphic Arts Collection (https://www.rit.edu/carycollection/). And while the deadline for abstracts is April 10, you may want to register earlier for the Calligraphy workshop presented by Kris Holmes (of Bigelow & Holmes) and Lorrie Frear (RIT faculty member) on July 23, the day before the conference. Space in the workshop is limited, and expected to quickly fill up -- so do not wait for February 29. Finally, the deadline for bursary (financial assistance) applications is April 15. Another important date is March 31 -- this is the deadline for submissions to the coming issue of TUGboat. TeX is an important tool for accessing mathematical and scientific texts by visually impaired people. I'd like to use some space in this newsletter to mention some advances in this area -- and discuss the possible ways for us, the TeX community, to contribute. First, there is a new typeface to facilitate reading by visually impaired people: http://www.luciole-vision.com/luciole-en.html. This is an interesting project, and I wonder if TeX font developers would want to take a look. While XeTeX and LuaTeX should support the text font out of the box (via fontspec), we might want to add legacy engines and the support of matching math. It would be nice to have the font in the standard TeX distributions: its CC-BY license is permissive enough. Another tool is the Accessible RMarkdown Writer, http://www.arowtool.com/. At present it is limited to Markdown syntax, and the authors mention that tools like LaTeX are ``considerably more difficult to use, and require much higher levels of proficiency to be able to use properly''. Still I think a similar LaTeX tool might be very useful. On another front: we have some new designs at https://www.redbubble.com/people/texusersgroup; if you have any TeX-related art you'd like to see on stickers, mugs, t-shirts, etc. -- please let us know. Philip Taylor found this great quotation; probably one of earliest mentions of CTAN in the popular literature: For a biography of Deputy Foreign Minister Richard Hausen and any information on his father, Smythe went on-line and executed FTPs to acquire data from ECRC Munich, Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron DESY, DKFZ Heidelberg, Gesellschaft f\"ur wissenschaftliche Datenverarbeitung mbH, Konrad-Zuse-Zentrum f\"ur Informationstechnik, and Comprehensive TeX Archive Network Heidelberg. (Tom Clancy, Op-Centre III: Games of State, 1996, Chapter 49). Note that CTAN was officially announced at the EuroTeX conference in Aston, 1993. I must say that in January's CTAN contributions I could not find any information on Richard Hausen or his father (or Tom Clancy), but the following new packages were found (https://ctan.org/pkg): - bearwear, shirts to dress tikzbears - cmupint, upright integral symbols for Computer Modern - expkv, an expandable key=val implementation - hep-paper, publications in High Energy Physics - physconst, macros for commonly used physical constants - physunits, macros for commonly used physical units - pmhanguljamo, a poor man's Hangul Jamo input method - scholax, an extended TeXGyreSchola (New Century Schoolbook) with math - secnum, a macro to format section numbering intuitively - simplebnf, a simple package to format Backus-Naur form (BNF) - texplate, a tool for creating document structures based on templates - thorshammer, assessment based on AcroTeX quizzes - tikz-trackschematic, a TikZ library for creating track diagrams in railways - verifica, a package to typeset (Italian high school) exercises - wasy-type1, Type 1 versions of wasy fonts Happy TeXing! Boris Veytsman, TUG President From tug-news at tug.org Mon Mar 2 23:07:27 2020 From: tug-news at tug.org (TeX Users Group) Date: Mon, 2 Mar 2020 15:07:27 -0700 Subject: [tex-announce] Mar20 TUG news: conferences, TUGboat, TeX Live pretest, Book Club of California Message-ID: <202003022207.022M7ReV017765@freefriends.org> Dear TeXers! I hope the extra day in February helped you with the backlog. The deadlines for TUG2020 (https://tug.org/tug2020/) are approaching fast. Do not forget to register for the conference and book your room in the hotel! And sign up for the calligraphy workshop if so inclined -- a few spots are left. Deadline for TUG20 proposals: April 10. Deadline for bursary (financial assistance) applications: April 15. Another conference with deadlines approaching fast is BachoTeX (http://gust.org.pl/bachotex/2020-en). The abstract submission is till March 22, and the early bird registration is until March 31. There is an interesting conference on grapholinguistics in Paris, June 17-19. Extended description: https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb41-1/tb127haralambous-grapholinguistics.pdf Conference page: https://grafematik2020.sciencesconf.org/ Speaking of deadlines, March 31 is the deadline for submissions to TUGboat, https://tug.org/TUGboat. In other news: TeXLive 2020 is close to the pretest: in a day or two, please take a look at https://tug.org/texlive/pretest.html if you want to help the TeX community by testing the new release. It is installed independently of any other TeX versions. In previous newsletters I wrote about an exposition at the Book Club of California on the history of TeX. If you happen to be near San Francisco, you may want to browse it, as well as the great Book Club library open to the general public at 312 Sutter Street. More info: https://www.bccbooks.org/ New CTAN packages in February: - brandeis-thesis, a class for Brandeis University M.A. theses; - emoji, emoji support in (Lua)LaTeX; - etbb, an extension of Edward Tufte's ET-Bembo family; - euclideangeometry, draw geometrical constructions; - fewerfloatpages, reduce the number of unnecessary float pages; - fontsize, a small package to set arbitrary sizes for the main font of the document; - haranoaji & haranoaji-extra, Harano Aji Fonts; - hitszthesis, a bachelor dissertation template for Harbin Institute of Technology, ShenZhen; - leiletter, a letter class for Leiden University; - lie-hasse, draw Hasse diagrams; - metastr, store and compose strings; - mpfonts, Computer Modern Type 3 fonts converted using MetaPost; - noto-emoji, Noto Emoji fonts; - optex, a LuaTeX format based on Plain TeX and OPmac; - pdfpc, define data for the pdfpc presentation viewer; - schulmathematik, commands and document classes for German-speaking teachers of mathematics and physics; - texlive-dummy-enterprise-linux-8, dummy TeX Live RPM for use with RHEL8 and derived distributions; - twemoji-colr, wemoji font in COLR/CPAL layered format. -- Good luck -Boris From karl at freefriends.org Thu Mar 12 23:19:35 2020 From: karl at freefriends.org (Karl Berry) Date: Thu, 12 Mar 2020 16:19:35 -0600 Subject: [tex-announce] 2020 conferences Message-ID: <202003122219.02CMJZWn030075@freefriends.org> Hello TeX folk - for anyone who may not have heard already, the BachoTeX conference in Poland is cancelled for this year due to the global virus situation. http://www.gust.org.pl/bachotex/2020-en As for the TUG'20 conference in Rochester, New York, it will not come as a surprise that we have to consider cancelling this as well. We don't have to make a final decision just yet about July, so we aren't. We expect to do so by the beginning of May, if circumstances don't dictate an earlier decision. If the conference is cancelled, all registration fees will be refunded. We do not have the resources to hold an online conference. Meanwhile, since we understand that no one can reasonably make travel plans at this time, we are pushing the principal conference deadlines back until mid-May. https://tug.org/tug2020 Good luck to us all, Karl (on behalf of the conference committee) From tug-news at tug.org Sun Apr 5 23:49:59 2020 From: tug-news at tug.org (TeX Users Group) Date: Sun, 5 Apr 2020 15:49:59 -0600 Subject: [tex-announce] Apr20 TUG news: health, conferences, TUGboat, TeX Live, stickers, CTAN Message-ID: <202004052149.035Lnx2I032218@freefriends.org> Dear TeXers We are trying to live in the new world shaped by the global pandemic. I hope all of us are safe and doing what we can to fight it. I have written a column about it for TUGboat. This column is available now at https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb41-1/tb127pres.pdf. We are actively exploring the options for TUG 2020 and the AGM. As promised, we will announce the decision before the middle of May. Of course, in the event of TUG'20 cancellation we will refund any registration fees. The grapholinguistics conference organized by Yannis Haralambous, mentioned in the last newsletter, will still take place from June 17-19, but now entirely by video. Extended description: https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb41-1/tb127haralambous-grapholinguistics.pdf Conference page: https://grafematik2020.sciencesconf.org/ We also decided to extend the early bird deadline for joining or renewing TeX membership till April 30; please visit https://tug.org/join.html. Thanks so much to everyone who has already joined or renewed this year. I am glad to report that TeX activities continue even in these hard times. The new issue of TUGboat (https://tug.org/TUGboat) is almost done, and should start mailing next month. However, disruptions in the global logistics systems due to the pandemic will affect the delivery of the physical copies of the journal. The mailing company is dealing with the problem on a much larger scale than our little TUGboat, as you can imagine, so it's expected to all happen in due time. TeX Live 2020 and the entire TeX Collection is undergoing the last tests before the public release. For news on the impending release, see https://tug.org/texlive/pretest.html. As with TUGboat, there will be some unknowable delay in the delivery of physical DVDs. Those attended TUG 2019, or read the proceedings, might recall Martin Ruckert's presentation about his HINT project, regarding a new TeX for mobile devices. For those who may be interested, his web site for the project recently went public at http://hint.userweb.mwn.de. I would like to remind everyone about the stickers and other TeX-branded merchandise available at https://www.redbubble.com/people/texusersgroup/shop. If you are stuck in quarantine and want to make a present to a TeX aficionado in your life, this might be a good idea for you. New packages on CTAN in March: - autofancyhdr, automatically compute headlength for fancyhdr package - biblatex-ajc2020unofficial, BibLaTeX style for the Australasian Journal of Combinatorics - biblatex2bibitem, convert BibLaTeX-generated bibliography to \bibitems - expkv-def, a key-defining frontend for expkv - expose-expl3-dunkerque-2019, using expl3 to implement numerical algorithms - git-latexdiff, call latexdiff on two Git revisions of a file - hitszbeamer, a beamer theme for Harbin Institute of Technology, ShenZhen - langsci-avm, attribute-value matrices and feature structures for use in linguistics - lua-uca, Unicode Collation Algorithm library for Lua - lua-ul, underlining for LuaLaTeX biblatex-german-legal, comprehensive citation style for German legal text - oops, a framework for making definitions, typically mathematical and inline - rest-api, describing a REST api - shortmathj, automatically shortify titles of mathematical journals - tikz-planets, illustrate celestial mechanics and the solar system - xepersian-hm, fixes kashida feature in xepersian package - yquant, typesetting quantum circuits in a human-readable language Happy TeXing - and stay safe! -- Good luck Boris Veytsman, TUG President From tug-news at tug.org Tue May 5 00:57:25 2020 From: tug-news at tug.org (TeX Users Group) Date: Mon, 4 May 2020 16:57:25 -0600 Subject: [tex-announce] May20 TUG news: tug'20 cancelled, TUGboat, TeX Live, CTAN Message-ID: <202005042257.044MvPfc028259@freefriends.org> Dear TeXers! The pandemic is touching all of us. I am sorry and sad for the losses many of us in the community have suffered. These are indeed hard times. I am sure we will survive them, but this will require courage and strength. I am sorry to report that due to the pandemic TUG2020 is canceled. The registered participants have been contacted by the TUG office. We will refund 100% of the fees, though you will have an option to convert them (in part or fully) to a donation to TUG. This will help us to continue providing important services to the TeX community; but of course you do not need to do that. We are investigating possibilities for conducting the conference in an online format and will provide further information if a viable approach is found. Usually we conduct the Annual General Meeting (AGM) during the TUG meeting. Since we cannot conduct an AGM in 2020, according to Article III, section 3 of TUG bylaws (http://tug.org/bylaws/node4.html) any and all business which might have been transacted at AGM 2020 will be transacted at the next succeeding meeting. In more cheering news, TUGboat 41:1 just hit the mailboxes of US subscribers. Due to the disruption of mail services by the pandemic, subscribers overseas may have the delivery delayed - we apologize for this. The electronic version is, of course, available for all members. The issue features notes from the LaTeX Project Team, papers about typography, creating accessible PDFs, TikZ, and many other subjects. TUGboat welcomes and needs articles for the upcoming issues this year! Please see https://tug.org/TUGboat. And now for some good news. I am glad to report that the new and shiny TeXLive 2020 is released. The major changes are listed online (https://www.tug.org/texlive/doc/texlive-en/texlive-en.html#news) and discussed in detail in the current issue of TUGboat. As usual, many thanks to the volunteers all over the world who made it happen! A list of the TL core contributors can be found here: https://tug.org/texlive/doc/texlive-en/texlive-en.html#x1-690008 The readers of our Twitter feed (@TeXUsersGroup) might have seen the recent interview with DEK, https://www.quantamagazine.org/computer-scientist-donald-knuth-cant-stop-telling-stories-20200416/ as well as a couple of fascinating documentaries on paper making: https://youtube.com/watch?v=ndFGj2tM2yk https://vimeo.com/409191271 New CTAN packages in April: - annee-scolaire, automatically typeset the academic year (French conventions) - biblatex-software, BibLaTeX stylefiles for software products - ccool, encoding notational conventions - diabetes-logbook, a logbook for people with type one diabetes - dpcircling, decorated text boxes using TikZ - emojicite, add emojis to citations - endnotes-hy, patches the endnotes package to create hypertext links to the correct anchors - epigraph-keys, epigraphs using key values - expkv-cs, define expandable key=val macros using expkv - jlreq-deluxe, multi-weight Japanese font support for the jlreq class - media4svg, multimedia inclusion for the dvisvgm backend - mercatormap, spherical Mercator coordinate systems and Web Mercator tile integration - musical, typeset (musical) theatre scripts - tex-nutshell, a short document about TeX principles - willowtreebook, easy basic book class, built on memoir Stay safe and healthy and, despite everything - Happy TeXing! Boris Veytsman TUG President From tug-news at tug.org Wed Jun 3 00:57:25 2020 From: tug-news at tug.org (TeX Users Group) Date: Tue, 2 Jun 2020 16:57:25 -0600 Subject: [tex-announce] Jun20 TUG news: tug'20 online, latex-dev, ctan Message-ID: <202006022257.052MvPui005310@freefriends.org> Dear TeXers, The events of the last months and weeks stressed the vulnerability of our culture and our way of life in general. This is frustrating and sad. However, our ancestors have lived through times of plagues, wars, disasters -- and not only survived them, but also created great works of art and science. I am sure we will survive these times as well -- and we should continue to work hard even when it seems to be impossible. One of the most hopeful pieces of news I can share is the fact that TUG2020 will occur, albeit online. See https://tug.org/tug2020/ for the details. Important dates: June 24 - deadline for abstracts for presentation proposals. July 10 - deadline for preprints to be in the program. July 24-26 - conference. August 3 - deadline for final papers for the printed TUGboat proceedings. I want to express my deep gratitude and admiration to many people and organizations who are making this possible (some of them are listed on the conference Web page). If you would like to participate, give a presentation, and/or volunteer to assist during the conference, we would be very grateful. Please see the conference web pages for details. There are more meetings planned for Fall 2020 and Spring 2021. Of course due to the pandemic the announcements are preliminary. - 14th ConTeXt Meeting, Prague-Sib'ina, Czech Republic, Sept. 6-12, 2020, http://meeting.contextgarden.net/2020 - DANTE meeting, Otto-von-Guericke-Universit?t, Magdeburg, Germany, March 10-12, 2021, https://www.dante.de/veranstaltungen/dante2021 In other news, the LaTeX Team has announced the release of the new development pre-release of the LaTeX kernel; see LaTeX News 32 for details. https://www.latex-project.org/news/ Igor Liferenko has released a new implementation of Metafont in CWEB based on the web2w program by Martin Ruckert. https://github.com/igor-liferenko/mf https://github.com/igor-liferenko/mf-wayland Dave Walden's review of History of Desktop Publishing by Frank Romano has been added to our book pages: https://tug.org/books/ May was a productive month for TeX software authors. Among new packages on CTAN are: - akshar, support for syllables in the Devanagari script - antanilipsum, generate sentences in the style of ``Amici miei'' - beamerappendixnote, create notes on appendix frames in beamer - biblatex-unified, unified stylesheet for linguistics journals - biblatex-vancouver, Vancouver style for BibLaTeX - bookshelf, ceate a nice image from a BibTeX file - helmholtz-ellis-ji-notation, beautiful in-line microtonal just intonation accidentals - lua-uni-algos, Unicode algorithms for LuaTeX - marathi, typeset Marathi language using XeLaTeX or LuaLaTeX - metanorma, writing Metanorma standardization documents using LaTeX - pwebmac, consolidated WEB macros for DVI and PDF output - readablecv, a highly readable and good looking CV and letter class - semantex, object-oriented mathematics - tikz-lake-fig, schematic diagrams of lakes - tikztosvg, a utility for rendering TikZ diagrams to SVG - tile-graphic, create tiles of a graphical file - utf8add, additional support for UTF-8 encoded LaTeX input - vcell, vertical alignment of content inside table cells Happy TeXing! Boris Veytsman, TUG President From tug-news at tug.org Mon Jul 6 00:24:07 2020 From: tug-news at tug.org (TeX Users Group) Date: Sun, 5 Jul 2020 16:24:07 -0600 Subject: [tex-announce] Jul20 TUG news: tug'20 online, podcasts, videos, books, ctan Message-ID: <202007052224.065MO7MZ013216@freefriends.org> Dear TeXers! I have celebrated the Fourth of July in the USA for several decades; this year is probably the strangest celebration yet, amidst a roaring epidemic, political upheavals and the general feeling of dissatisfaction. On the other hand, as the famous quote, ascribed to various non-American politicians, says, you can always count on Americans to do the right thing - after they've tried everything else. Let us hope that the time of trying everything else is coming to its end. TUG 2020 is coming, and it is going to be a great event. Please refer to https://tug.org/tug2020/ for the latest news. Another important meeting is The 14th ConTeXt Meeting in September. The decision to hold it in person or online is going to be made at the end of July. The pre-registration is open; please check https://meeting.contextgarden.net/2020/. A good way to spend your time during partial or full lockdowns is watching movies or listening to podcasts. Here are some for your pleasure: - ACM bytecast with DEK, https://learning.acm.org/bytecast - Questions answered by DEK at the Computer History Museum, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbJdgKATZEU - A movie about the last day of Linotype machines at the New York Times, https://vimeo.com/127605643 - A movie about independent booksellers, https://thebooksellers.vhx.tv/packages/the-booksellers-for-the-book-club-of-california/ (this rental is non-free, and part of the proceeds benefits the Book Club of California) For those who prefer reading: Oak Knoll decided to give TUG members 10% on their books, please see http://tug.org/books/#discounts for the details on this and other discounts. For online shopping you might want to take a look at https://mathpix.com/hat - or check out merchandise at our store: https://www.redbubble.com/people/texusersgroup/shop June was a busy month at CTAN. Among the new arrivals: - beamertheme-pure-minimalistic, a minimalist beamer theme - commutative-diagrams, CoDi: Commutative Diagrams for TeX - CondiTeXt, define and manage conditional content - courierten, Courier 10 Pitch BT with LaTeX support - dtk-bibliography, Die TeXnische Kom\"odie bibliography - EkType-Tanka, Devanagari fonts by EkType - hvarabic, macros for RTL typesetting - kpfonts-otf, OTF version of the Kp-fonts - menucard, setting menucards with LaTeX - MLMath, mathematical notation for Machine Learning - namedef, TeX definitions with named parameters - qrbill, create Swiss QR bills using LaTeX - ShtThesis, an unofficial LaTeX thesis template for ShanghaiTech University - SpiX, yet another TeX compilation tool: simple, human readable, no option, no magic Happy TeXing! Boris Veytsman TUG President From tug-news at tug.org Mon Aug 3 23:41:21 2020 From: tug-news at tug.org (TeX Users Group) Date: Mon, 3 Aug 2020 15:41:21 -0600 Subject: [tex-announce] Aug20 TUG news: tug'20 online, tugboat, wayzgoose, ctan Message-ID: <202008032141.073LfLqP018409@freefriends.org> Dear TeXers, I still cannot believe we made it: TUG 2020 was held despite epidemics and lockdowns. Three days of non-stop discussions, talks, and even virtual social events. It would not have been possible without the energy and dedication of the Conference Committee, the session chairs, the speakers and the audience - as well as the generous help of our sponsors. The videos of the presentations are being edited. You will find them eventually at https://tug.org/tug2020. The next issue of TUGboat will be the Proceedings issue. While working on it, we are also starting to accept papers for the following issue - the deadline is October 15. Speaking of TUGboat, many of us enjoyed Peter Wilson's columns in the journal. TUG is pleased to announce the publication of the collection of these columns in book form. The book, Glisterings, is available from the TUG store - https://tug.org/store/glisterings/ - and other outlets. The attendees of TUG 2020 had a great opportunity to listen to Amelia Hugill-Fontanel's lecture on type specimens. If the subject interests you, you might want to attend the (online) 2020 Awayzgoose conference on wood type, letterpress, and all things type, organized by Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum together with the American Printing History Association, Nov. 5-8: https://woodtype.org/pages/wayzgoose. New packages on CTAN in July (more info for all at https://ctan.org/pkg): - beamerthemenord, a simple beamer theme using the `Nord' color theme - bubblesort, bubble sorts a list - charissil, CharisSIL fonts with LaTeX support - chhaya, linguistic glossing in Marathi language - edichokey, typeset dichotomous identification keys - ekdosis, typesetting TEI XML-compliant critical editions - exesheet, typesetting exercise or exam sheets - expkv-opt, parse class and package options with expkv - ibarra, LaTeX support for the Ibarra Real Nova family of fonts - install-latex-guide-zh-cn, a short introduction to LaTeX installation, written in Chinese - ltx4yt, lay YouTube videos in the default browser - membranecomputing, membrane computing notation - nimsticks, draws sticks for games of multi-pile Nim - schooldocs, various layout styles for school documents - tikzpackets, display network packets - tlmgrbasics, simplified documentation for tlmgr - verifiche, a LaTeX package to typeset (Italian) high school tests - xml2pmx, convert MusicXML to PMX and MusiXTeX - zztex, a full-featured TeX macro package for producing books, journals, and manuals In other CTAN news: a(n optional) provision in the Open Font License forbids repackaging fonts in another format without changing the font name. (Specifically, the "Reserved Font Name" clause, which font authors may or may not choose to use, at their option.) Notably for the TeX world, this applies to the translation of OpenType and TrueType fonts to Type 1. Bob Tennent has updated a number of his font support packages to comply with the license (by changing the font name for Type 1 fonts). All support packages for OFL-licensed fonts should check on this. Happy TeXing! Boris Veytsman TUG President From tug-news at tug.org Thu Sep 3 03:09:15 2020 From: tug-news at tug.org (TeX Users Group) Date: Wed, 2 Sep 2020 19:09:15 -0600 Subject: [tex-announce] Sep20 TUG news: tug'20 videos and proceedings, election, ctan Message-ID: <202009030109.08319Flm022097@freefriends.org> Dear TeXers, The main item in the last newsletter was the first ever online TUG conference. We hoped to release the videos immediately after the conference. It looks like we made the same mistake Don made when he thought he would mostly finish a typesetting system in a year-long sabbatical. It took more than a month to edit the videos, and the dedicated work of our amateur video mixing team. The videos for the keynotes and workshop are available now at https://youtube.com/channel/UC3h-SCx3yCT1CGkq9gTkOiA and the rest will be coming over the following days. If you like, please subscribe to the channel to be notified about new content. I would like to thank all the volunteers for the conference, including Paulo Ney de Souza, Norbert Preining, Frank and Holger Mittelbach, Ross Moore, Karl Berry, Jim Hefferon, Arthur Rosendahl, Alan Wetmore: you made this possible! In other news, the proceedings issue of TUGboat is now at the printers. I did not think at the beginning of the pandemic lockdowns I would be able to say this phrase in 2020! We are starting to work on the next issue; the deadline for new submissions is October 15. https://tug.org/TUGboat The terms of many TUG board members expire in 2021. We will have a busy election year. The announcement and details of the nomination process: https://tug.org/election Returning to videos, Doug McKenna found this interesting talk about GPT-3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_x9AwxfjxvE. At 4:20 of this video it is claimed that an AI application can convert a verbal description of a mathematical equation into LaTeX code. New packages on CTAN in August: - algpseudocodex, package for typesetting pseudocode; - decision-table, an easy way to create Decision Model and Notation decision tables; - frpseudocode, French translation for the algorithmicx package; - leftindex, left indices with better spacing; - luaprogtable, programmable table interface for LuaLaTeX; - notomath, math support for Noto fonts; - oup-authoring-template, a general template for journals published by Oxford University Press (OUP); - qyxf-book, book template for Qian Yuan Xue Fu, a student club of Xi'an Jiaotong University; - spectral, Spectral fonts with LaTeX support; - stricttex, strictly balanced brackets and numbers in command names; - texnegar, kashida justification in XeLaTeX and LuaLaTeX; - totalcount, commands for typesetting total values of counters. Happy TeXing! Boris Veytsman TUG President From tug-news at tug.org Sun Oct 4 03:39:38 2020 From: tug-news at tug.org (TeX Users Group) Date: Sat, 3 Oct 2020 19:39:38 -0600 Subject: [tex-announce] TUG'20 proceedings+videos, LaTeX 2020-10-01, CTAN, links Message-ID: <202010040139.0941dcoX000969@freefriends.org> Dear TeXers! In the last issue of this newsletter I wrote that the 2020 Proceedings issue of TUGboat was at the printers. Today those of you who subscribe to the physical edition have probably received your copy. I enjoyed reading it! According to our policy, the previous issue, 41:1, is now publicly available. The next (regular) issue of TUGboat is being compiled. The deadline is October 15; if you have a contribution, please consider submitting it in time for 41:3. See https://tug.org/TUGboat/ for information and links. Another bit of post-conference TUG'20 news: thanks to much hard work by Paulo Ney de Souza, Norbert Preining, and others, videos of all presentations are now available: https://youtube.com/c/TeXUsersGroup/playlists?view=50&shelf_id=2 Browse and enjoy! There are several notable future conferences: - October 31: GuIT 2020, the meeting of Gruppo Utilizzatori Italiani di TeX, https://www.guitex.org/home/meeting. It will be held online this year. Attending the conference is free of charge and it does not require registration. The deadline for submissions is October 18. - November 5-8: Awayzgoose type conference, also online, hosted by the Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum and the American Printing History Association, https://woodtype.org/pages/wayzgoose-schedule. - March 10--11, 2022: DANTE Meeting, https://www.dante.de/veranstaltungen/dante2021. Perhaps the most significant news for LaTeX users is the release of the 2020-10-01 version of LaTeX; it includes a number of changes in the kernel as well as a new hook mechanism. The LaTeX News installment will be posted shortly at https://www.latex-project.org/news/latex2e-news (it will also appear in the next TUGboat). Leading up to this release, parallel formats (pdf,lua,xe,...)latex-dev have been available for some time (and they will continue to be made). Their purpose is to make it easier for users, package authors and the LaTeX team to test release candidates before an official new version. (See https://www.latex-project.org/news/latex2e-news/ltnews30.pdf for more info on the -dev formats. In general, just run, e.g., "pdflatex-dev" instead of "pdflatex" to give it a try, and report problems.) We encourage users and package authors both to test their work with the new LaTeX version, and to routinely use the -dev formats to help test releases in the future. In another area of the TeX world, another important update is the addition of a new CTAN macro directory. The new directory tree CTAN:/macros/unicodetex/ (https://ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/unicodetex) is for macros that work only with Unicode engines like XeTeX and LuaTeX (e.g., not pdfTeX). In contrast, the trees CTAN:/macros/luatex/ and CTAN:/macros/xetex/ are for macros specific to LuaTeX and XeTeX respectively, while the directories outside of these trees are for macros that work either for all engines, or for the "traditional" ones only. Package authors are invited to check the classification of their works and inform CTAN if a change should be made. A couple of interesting links (both thanks to Nelson Beebe). 1. A web site about Joseph-Balthazar Sylvestre's Alphabet Album (1843): https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/sylvestre-alphabet-album (the file can be downloaded from https://openlibrary.org/books/OL24619029M/Alphabet-album, https://ia800206.us.archive.org/9/items/alphabetalbumcol00silv/alphabetalbumcol00silv.pdf or https://download.digitale-sammlungen.de/BOOKS/download.pl?id=bsb10328517). By the way, TeX distributions feature a good collection of initials fonts; see https://tug.org/FontCatalogue/otherfonts.html#initials. However, there is an interesting feature which I have seen so far only in some commercial decorative initials. Some foundries offer matching font files for the letters and the decorations, allowing one to have multicolored initials like the ones in medieval manuscripts. TeX with its \rlap command provides a natural way to use this feature. It might be an interesting task to implement it for free fonts as well. 2. An amusing list of future TeX news is included in the post by David F. Griffiths and Desmond J. Higham about the second edition of their excellent book from SIAM, "Learning LaTeX": https://sinews.siam.org/Details-Page/writing-learning-latex. The 2022 news item in the collection made my day. By the way, I was thrilled by the statement in the post that it was TUGboat and my review that urged the authors to issue the new edition. Finally, new CTAN packages in September (see https://ctan.org/pkg/ for more about all packages, as always): - cmathbb, Computer Modern mathematical bold font; - docutils, helper commands and element definitions for Docutils LaTeX output (https://docutils.sourceforge.io/); - doulossil, a font for typesetting the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA); - josefin, Josefin fonts with LaTeX support; - light-latex-make (llmk), a build tool for LaTeX documents (presentation at TUG'20 about it: https://youtube.com/watch?v=47EJWVjOPlc) - lua-physical, functions and objects for computation of physical quantities; - semtex, dealing with stripped SemanTeX documents; - unitipa, TIPA typefaces with Unicode characters as input; Happy TeXing! Boris Veytsman, TUG President From tug-news at tug.org Thu Nov 5 17:51:14 2020 From: tug-news at tug.org (TeX Users Group) Date: Thu, 5 Nov 2020 09:51:14 -0700 Subject: [tex-announce] Nov20 TUG news: meetings, TUGboat, reviews, DEK, tutorials, CTAN Message-ID: <202011051651.0A5GpEh1008457@freefriends.org> Dear TeXers November is upon us. I hope you had a great October. Those who celebrated Halloween had an occasion to use https://ctan.org/pkg/halloweenmath. It is still not too late to dress up your equations by saying, for example, \let\sum=\mathwitch and \let\prod=\bigpumpkin. GuIT (Gruppo Utilizzatori Italiani di TeX, the official Italian TUG) just finished its (virtual) meeting: https://www.guitex.org/home/meeting Congratulations to them! The last 2020 issue of TUGboat is with the printer. The deadline for submissions to the next issue is March 31, 2021. Speaking of the 41:3 issue of TUGboat, it has Prof. Charles Bigelow's review of two books by Henrik Vervliet about the illustrious sixteenth century type designer Robert Granjon. The review is available at http://tug.org/books/reviews/tb129reviews-vervliet.html. If you decide to order these books from Oak Knoll, please do not forget about the discount for TUG members. To get it, log in to https://tug.org/members/ and search for the Oak Knoll coupon code under Member discounts. To continue the topic of typography and books about typography, here is an interesting review of the best typography books for designers (thanks to Dave Walden for finding it): https://www.typewolf.com/typography-books New and additional DEK videos have been added to our list at https://tug.org/interviews/#knuthav. Thanks to Dave Walden and Shreevatsa R for their contributions. In other news, a great tutorial about LaTeX3 was recently published by Alan Xiang: https://www.alanshawn.com/latex3-tutorial/ Highly recommended for any and all non-expert L3 hackers. New packages on CTAN in October: - amiweb2c-guide, a guide for installation of AmiWeb2c; - association-matrix, LaTeX support for creating association matrices; - centerlastline, paragraphs with last line centered, known as Spanish paragraphs; - color-edits, colorful edits for multiple authors of a shared document; - dvivue, a DVI/PDF viewer for Windows; - frimurer, access to the 'frimurer' cipher for use with LaTeX; - graphpaper, a LaTeX class to generate several types of graph papers; - jupynotex, include whole or partial Jupyter notebooks in LaTeX documents; - latex-firstaid, patches from the LaTeX team for external LaTeX packages that need updating to work with new releases; - ltx2mathml, convert LaTeX math to MathML; - nnext, extension for the gb4e package used in linguistics; - otf2woff, OpenType to Woff converter; - plimsoll, fonts with the Plimsoll symbol and LaTeX support; - principia, notations for typesetting the Principia Mathematica; - realtranspose, the `real' way to transpose a Matrix; - runcode, execute foreign source code and embed the result in the pdf file; - skills, create proficiency tests; - startlatex2e, a guide to getting started with LaTeX2e; - swfigure, insert large images that do not fit into a single page; - syntaxdi, create railroad syntax diagrams; - t1subset, a C++ library for subsetting PostScript Type 1 fonts; - tikz-among-us, reate some AmongUs characters in TikZ environments; - utfsym, provides various Unicode symbols; - woff2otf, Woff to OpenType converter; - xmuthesis, XMU thesis style. In addition, the dktools package (drawing, graphics conversions, and more) is no longer on CTAN: over the last few years it has become less TeX related, and the author has decided to withdraw it from CTAN. The package remains available at https://sourceforge.net/project/dktools. Happy TeXing! From tug-news at tug.org Sat Dec 5 03:20:59 2020 From: tug-news at tug.org (TeX Users Group) Date: Fri, 4 Dec 2020 19:20:59 -0700 Subject: [tex-announce] Dec20 TUG news: CTAN+fun, books+reviews, calendar, election Message-ID: <202012050220.0B52KxNn002296@freefriends.org> Dear TeXers, The holiday season is upon us. Best wishes to everybody, and let's have festive celebrations and start a great year. It is a sad duty to remind everybody to be safe this holiday season and postpone most human contacts until next year. Hopefully the success of medicine will make 2021 much better than 2020, and we will be able to return to normal life, with its hugs and kisses, friendly dinners and carefree meetings. I guess this is one of the most wished for things today. If you need some cheering up (and who does not?), some CTAN packages may help: https://ctan.org/pkg/xii, https://ctan.org/pkg/xii-lat, https://ctan.org/pkg/happy4th, https://ctan.org/pkg/tikzducks, https://ctan.org/pkg/tikzlings, https://ctan.org/pkg/tikzmarmots, https://ctan.org/pkg/bearwear, and, of course, https://ctan.org/pkg/scsnowman. Peter Wilson created his traditional gift to the community: Japanese wood block calendars for 2021; see https://tug.org/calendar. Some book news. We published a review of the 2nd edition of the famous SIAM book "Learning LaTeX" by David F. Griffiths and Desmond J. Higham (http://tug.org/books/#learning-latex2). The book "Future of Text" may be interesting for our community (and some of the community members contributed to it). Get it for free from https://futuretextpublishing.com/. Edward Tufte published a new book in his series, titled "Seeing With Fresh Eyes: Meaning, Space, Data, Truth"; see https://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/seeing-with-fresh-eyes. The current issue of TUGboat has probably been received by the most subscribers. Let me remind you that the electronic versions of all previous issues, including the TUG 2020 proceedings, are now open for the general public. The deadline for the next issue is March 31 - we are eager for your contributions about all things TeX! A reminder and request for donations, as usual for December: contributions to TUG are tax deductible in the US, and you can donate at https://tug.org/ (just click the "Donate" button). If you wish to join us as a member, so much the better! Membership dues are also tax deductible less the value of benefits. Finally, 2021 will be an election year for TUG. If you are interested in running for a position, please see https://tug.org/election. New CTAN packages in November: - causets, draw causal set (Hasse) diagrams; - datax, import individual data from script files; - first-packages, a short list of go-to LaTeX packages, aimed at a beginner; - mluexercise, exercises/homework at the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg; - muling, class for writing MA thesis at the Department of Linguistics, University of Mumbai; - orcidlink, insert hyperlinked ORCiD logo; - rojud, a font with the images of the counties of Romania; - semesterplanner, create beautiful semester timetables and more. Happy TeXing! Boris Veytsman, TUG President