[tex-announce] May20 TUG news: tug'20 cancelled, TUGboat, TeX Live, CTAN

[TeX Users Group]

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