From tug-news at tug.org Sun Jan 3 00:52:17 2021 From: tug-news at tug.org (TeX Users Group) Date: Sat, 2 Jan 2021 16:52:17 -0700 Subject: [tex-announce] Jan21 TUG news: videos, memberships, election, calendars Message-ID: <202101022352.102NqH7K005553@freefriends.org> Dear TeXers, The strangest year in the lives of many of us has ended. Let us hope 2021 will be much better. The Great Tikzlings Christmas Extravaganza 2020 was one of the highlights of the holiday season. If you did not see it yet, you might want to try https://vimeo.com/492532561. Speaking of interesting videos, here is another, where Richard Kegler (P22 Type Foundry, p22.com) and Amelia Hugill-Fontanel (RIT Cary Graphic Arts Collection, cary.rit.edu) discuss the seven lives of a typeface, specifically LTC Goudy Initials, including recasting of metal type: https://youtube.com/watch?v=S1ldj5LMv8Y. By the way, both RIT Cary Press and P22 Foundry products have been used as prizes for new members. As a reminder, every year we conduct a raffle among all new members, and the lucky winner gets a special prize. In 2021 our lottery will have not one, but four prizes from P22; a good incentive to join TUG. As in previous years, we have a greatly reduced trial membership fee for first time members: https://tug.org/trial. On the other hand, if you are a TUG member already, please do not forget to renew your membership here: https://tug.org/join.html and enjoy the early bird rate (until March 31). TUG is supported by the membership fees and generous donations from the TeX community. Speaking of TUG business, 2021 is an election year. The deadline for nominations is March 1; all election information is posted at https://tug.org/election. March 31 is the deadline for submissions to TUGboat, our flagship publication. Please see author information at https://tug.org/TUGboat/location.html. New CTAN packages in December: - albatross, find fonts that contain a given glyph; - archivo, the Archivo font face with support for all LaTeX forms; - arvo, the Arvo font face with support for all LaTeX forms; - bithesis, templates for the Beijing Institute of Technology; - chinesejfm, luatexja-jfm files for Chinese typesetting; - easyfloats, an easier interface to insert figures, etc. in LaTeX; - froufrou, fancy section separators; - inter, the inter font face with support for all LaTeX forms; - oswald, the Oswald family of fonts with support for all LaTeX forms; - pbalance, balance last page in two-column mode; - puyotikz, quickly typeset board states of Puyo Puyo games; - skeldoc, placeholders for unfinished documents; - stepgreek, a free Times/Elsevier-style Greek font; - uninormalize, Unicode normalization support in Lua. Last note for the new year: Hans-Martin M\"unch has updated his package for calendar creation in several languages, https://ctan.org/pkg/calxxxx-yyyy. I'd also like to mention that Peter Wilson has once again provided lovely Japanese woodblock calendars available to all from http://tug.org/calendar.html. Happy TeXing! Boris Veytsman TUG President From tug-news at tug.org Wed Feb 3 03:14:33 2021 From: tug-news at tug.org (TeX Users Group) Date: Tue, 2 Feb 2021 19:14:33 -0700 Subject: [tex-announce] Feb21 TUG news: elections, lectures, papers, TeX tuneup, CTAN Message-ID: <202102030214.1132EX5C023736@freefriends.org> Dear TeXers! The most notable upcoming event for TUG members is this year's election. Nominations for board member or president are due: 07:00 a.m. PST, 1 March 2021 The process is described at https://tug.org/election. We have an unusually high number of expiring terms this year. Please consider serving the community if you have the time and inclination to do so. Our friends at the Cary Graphics Art Collection at the Rochester Institute of Technology (https://rit.edu/carycollection/) posted a schedule of their own new events. There are some notable entries including a Cary Pressroom Tour (February 12) with associate curator Amelia Hugill-Fontanel, who delivered a memorable talk on type speciments at TUG 2020 (available online, https://tug.org/tug2020), a lecture about Tibetan typeforms (February 26) by Jo De Baerdemaeker, a tour of the collection with curator Steven Galbraith (April 16), and other events, see https://mailchi.mp/rit/cary-collection-news-jan2021. All are online. Cary events require (free) registration; while their form is geared towards RIT students and faculty, the general public is allowed and encouraged to join in (set your affiliation as 'Other' on the form). Amelia is also the latest subject in the Interview Corner. Her interview, conducted by David Walden, includes many illustrations of some amazing book- and type-related items from the Cary Collection: https://tug.org/interviews/hugill-fontanel.pdf On another front, the LearnLaTeX website has gone public: https://learnlatex.org/en/ It contains 16 short lessons, interactive examples, and is available in many languages. Give it a whirl, send feedback, pass it on ... Some of us may have attended the lecture by DEK in 2014 about unfortunate trends in the history of computer science. The transcript of the lecture is now published in the Communications of the ACM: https://doi.org/10.1145/3442377. In other DEK news, he has finished the 2021 tuneup of TeX, Metafont and friends! The updates are being tested and will soon be on CTAN and in distributions. The report will appear in the next issue of TUGboat. New packages on CTAN in January: - aalok, LaTeX class file for the Marathi journal `Aalok'; - alfaslabone, the Alfa Slab One typeface; - cascadia-code, the Cascadia Code font; - chifoot, Chicago-style footnote formatting; - easybook, typeset Chinese books or notes; - gudea, the Gudea typeface; - hindmadurai, the HindMadurai typeface; - luakeys, a Lua module for parsing key-value options; - magra, the Magra typeface; - matapli, class for the French journal `MATAPLI'; - mlmodern, a blacker Type 1 version of Computer Modern, with multilingual support; - nunito, the Nunito typeface; - orientation, set page orientation with dvips/Ghostscript (ps2pdf); - play-font, the Play typeface; - profcollege, a LaTeX package for French maths teachers in college; - pxpic, draw pixel pictures; - sankey, draw Sankey diagrams with TikZ; - tikz-bbox, precise determination of bounding boxes in TikZ. Finally, let me mention that the latest update to the newcomputermodern font project provides complete coverage of all Unicode math characters: https://ctan.org/ctan-ann/id/mailman.3089.1611042712.2532.ctan-ann at ctan.org Happy TeXing! Boris Veytsman TUG President From tug-news at tug.org Fri Mar 5 23:41:42 2021 From: tug-news at tug.org (TeX Users Group) Date: Fri, 5 Mar 2021 15:41:42 -0700 Subject: [tex-announce] Mar21 TUG news: elections, tug'21, donations, bibnet, ctan Message-ID: <202103052241.125Mfgkb017921@freefriends.org> Dear TeXers, March is upon us, which means that the deadline for nomination of TUG officers is passed. This year we had fewer nominations than open positions. According to the Bylaws the nominees are taking their positions with the next TUG meeting. They are: president Boris Veytsman, and board members: Karl Berry, Johannes Braams, Kaja Christiansen, Klaus H\"oppner, Frank Mittelbach, Ross Moore, Arthur Rosendahl. I want to extend my gratitude to the retiring board members: Taco Hoekwater, Will Robertson, Herbert Vo\ss. Thanks for your service! Speaking of the next TUG. The vaccination in many countries goes full steam, and we hope to suppress the epidemics by the end of the year. Still, there is no guarantee that international travel will be restored in time for the conference. Therefore the Board has made a prudent decision to have TUG2021 online. The dates are August 6--8. The official announcement and call for papers are forthcoming; in the meantime you may contact the conference committee at tug2021 at tug.org. Submissions and expressions of interest for presents would be most welcome. Returning to the topic of elections. As we announced earlier, TUG is now an affiliate member of the Open Software Initiative, https://opensource.org/. In the coming elections we can compete for a place on its Board. Norbert Preining is nominated for an Affiliate Seat of OSI from TUG (https://wiki.opensource.org/bin/Main/OSI%20Board%20of%20Directors/Board%20Member%20Elections/2021%20Individual%20and%20Affiliate%20Elections/Preining2021/). If you are an individual OSI member, you might want to consider his candidacy. TUG, being a non-profit, is supported by membership fees and donations. If you live in the US and use Amazon for your purchases, as many people do in these times of pandemics, you may be eligible for the Amazon Smile program, which donates 0.5% of the money you spend to a non-profit of your choice. If you'd like to designate TUG for your Amazon Smile donations, you may find the link https://smile.amazon.com/ch/22-2868942 handy. In other news, Nelson Beebe announces the first release of a complete bibliography of The Journal of Typographic Research, and an extensive one of its renamed successor journal, Visible Language. Both are in a single file at http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/bib/visible-language.bib and http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/bib/visible-language.html. There are BibTeX entries for 1093 articles in the file, and 966 (88%) of them have abstracts. The journals are included in the combined SQLite3 database file at http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/bib/history-journals.db which includes BibTeX entries for almost 251,400 articles from 135 distinct journals in the fields of the history of mathematics, science, and technology. New packages on CTAN in February (https://ctan.org/pkg): atkinson, support for the Atkinson Hyperlegible family of fonts; eczar, a font family supporting Devanagari and Latin script; eq-pin2corr, add PIN security to the `Correct' button of a quiz created by exerquiz; hindawi-latex-template, a LaTeX template for authors of the Hindawi journals; innerscript, modifies automatic mathematics spacing; langsci-affiliations, collect and order authors and affiliations; numerica, numerically evaluate mathematical expressions in LaTeX form; pdfmanagement-testphase, LaTeX PDF management testphase bundle; quran-bn, Bengali translations to the quran package; twemojis, use Twitter's open source emojis through LaTeX commands. Happy TeXing! Boris Veytsman TUG President From tug-news at tug.org Thu Apr 8 03:17:14 2021 From: tug-news at tug.org (TeX Users Group) Date: Wed, 7 Apr 2021 19:17:14 -0600 Subject: [tex-announce] Apr21 TUG news: conferences, Knuth and TeX Live, election, CTAN Message-ID: <202104080117.1381HEUJ007334@freefriends.org> Dear TeXers, There is much exciting news for the TeX community to report. First, the annual meeting, TUG2021, is being held online, like the previous one. Paulo Ney de Souza, who was in charge of TUG2020, is organizing TUG2021 together with Arthur Rosendahl, so I am sure the new meeting is going to be as successful as the previous one. The meeting dates are August 5-8, and the Web page is https://tug.org/tug2021. As in the previous year, we decided to waive the conference fee for the online meeting, and we are grateful for our generous sponsors who helped to pay for the IT and other support. You may join their ranks by adding a donation on your registration form. Submissions are due before June 24: see the call for papers at https://tug.org/tug2021/callforpapers.html. Another important meeting, the 15th International ConTeXt Meeting, will be held offline in Bassenge, Belgium from September 20-25, 2021, the fourth meeting held at 't Sjetootje / Ch\^ateau Boirs: see https://meeting.contextgarden.net. Registration opens on May 1. The theme for this meeting is: expanding orbits. The programme committee is Hans Hagen and Taco Hoekwater. In other news, TeX Live 2021 has been released, and mostly made its way to the CTAN mirrors; see https://tug.org/texlive. The principal changes are described at https://tug.org/texlive/doc/texlive-en/texlive-en.html#news DEK has announced a special Jubilee Edition of volumes ABCDE of Computers and Typesetting, adding a ``plentiful new dose of spit and polish'' to the definitive summary of TeX, Metafont and Computer Modern (https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/abcde.html#jubilee). Some of the changes to the programs (the ``2021 tuneup'') are described in Knuth's report in TUGboat, available now as a preprint at https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb42-1/tb130knuth-tuneup21.pdf. They are incorporated in TeX Live 2021. The new editions will be available in print later this year. TUG election results are available at https://tug.org/election. Because there is a single nomination for the office of President and because there are not more nominations for the Board of Directors than there are open seats, there is no requirement for a ballot this election. Two current vacancies on the Board were filled by appointment (Section 7 of our Bylaws, https://tug.org/bylaws). Ulrike Fischer and Paulo Cereda have kindly accepted and are now new Board members. TUGboat 42:1 is now being finalized; the next issue will be the TUG2021 proceedings. Please submit presentations to the conference, as noted above, or if you prefer to write an article for the regular issue in the fall, we welcome that too. The TUGboat website with deadlines, author information, archives, and more is https://tug.org/TUGboat. New packages on CTAN in March (see https://ctan.org/pkg): aesupp, special support for the italic \ae{} character; beamertheme-trigon, a modern, elegant, and versatile theme for Beamer; beaulivre, write your books in a colorful way; biblatex-license, add license data to the bibliography; buctthesis, Beijing University of Chemical Technology thesis template; colorist, classes to typeset articles or books, with a colorful design; econlipsum, generate sentences from economic articles; einfart, write your articles in a simple and clear way; eq-fetchbbl, match Biblical passages with verse references in a quiz; foliono, use folio numbers to replace page numbers; gckanbun, Kanbun typesetting for upLaTeX and LuaLaTeX; gridpapers, graph paper backgrounds and color schemes; highlightlatex, syntax highlighting for LaTeX; hitreport, Harbin Institute of Technology Report LaTeX Template; knuth-pdf, PDF collection of typeset C/WEB sources in TeX Live; lebhart, write your articles in a colorful way; lectureslides, combine single PDF files into one file; lua-typo, highlighting typographical flaws with LuaLaTeX; mindflow, add a memo section; minimalist, classes to typeset articles or books with a simple, clear design; newpax, experimental package to extract and reinsert PDF annotations; nl-interval, represent intervals on the number line; scrlayer-fancyhdr, combining package fancyhdr with KOMA-Script's scrlayer; simplivre, write your books in a simple and clear way; suppose, abbreviate the word `Suppose'; tzplot, plot graphs with TikZ abbreviations; xesoul, use the soul package with XeLaTeX; zbmath-review-template, template for a zbMATH Open review. Happy TeXing! Boris Veytsman TUG President From tug-news at tug.org Tue May 4 00:14:10 2021 From: tug-news at tug.org (TeX Users Group) Date: Mon, 3 May 2021 16:14:10 -0600 Subject: [tex-announce] May21 TUG news: conferences, TUGboat, dvd, VPAT, CTAN Message-ID: <202105032214.143MEAJj024951@freefriends.org> Dear TeXers, May is upon us. Here in the US the vaccination campaign is efficiently decreasing the level of the pandemic, though there is far to go. The European Union after a slow start also picks up its vaccination campaign. However, worldwide COVID is far from being conquered. Our hearts are with our colleagues and friends in India and other countries experiencing a dangerous new wave. TUG2021, as we announced earlier, will be held online on August 5--8: https://tug.org/tug2021/ Registration is open (no cost), and the call for papers is posted (deadline June 24): https://tug.org/tug2021/callforpapers.html Please send in presentation proposals sooner rather than later if possible. It greatly helps in planning. Also, the 15th ConTeXt meeting will take place on September 20--25 in Bassenge, Belgium; the call for papers: https://meeting.contextgarden.net/2021/ In other news, TUGboat 42:1 is with the printers; printed copies should go out by the end of the month. It is going to be a very interesting issue. The next issue will be the proceedings of TUG2021. In addition, the TeX Collection DVD, containing TeX Live, MacTeX, proTeXt/MiKTeX, and a CTAN snapshot, is at the manufacturer's and can be ordered now from TUG: https://tug.org/texcollection/ Many users have been for quite some time asking us for an Accessibility Conformance Report based on VPAT templates. It increasingly becomes a requirement for the use of TeX tools in a government related context for many countries. We started the effort of drafting one (https://github.com/TeXUsersGroup/TeX-VPAT). If you want to join it, please write to me at president at tug.org. New packages on CTAN in April: - beamerthemelalic, a beamer theme for LALIC; - byo-twemojis, `Build Your Own Twemojis' with TikZ; - dimnum, commands for dimensionless numbers; - dynbrackets, commands to simplify the syntax of dynamic math brackets; - figchild, pictures for creating children's activities; - huawei, template for Huawei documents; - mahjong, typeset Mahjong Tiles using MPSZ Notation; - ninecolors, select colors with proper WCAG color contrast; - tipauni, producing Unicode characters with TIPA commands; - tlmgr-intro-zh-cn, a short tutorial on using tlmgr in Chinese; - worldflags, drawing the world's flags with TikZ; - xintsession, interactive computing sessions (fractions, floating points, polynomials). Happy TeXing! Boris Veytsman TUG President From tug-news at tug.org Thu Jun 3 00:41:54 2021 From: tug-news at tug.org (TeX Users Group) Date: Wed, 2 Jun 2021 16:41:54 -0600 Subject: [tex-announce] Jun21 TUG news: TUGboat 42:1, TUG'21, LaTeX release, CTAN Message-ID: <202106022241.152MfsMe019333@freefriends.org> Dear TeXers, I've just received my issue of TUGboat (42:1). Among interesting materials in the issue is DEK's report of the 2021 TeX tuneup accompanied by the description of the TeX entomology process by Karl Berry, and (in the aptly named section ``Dreamboat'') a look backward by Barbara Beeton about TeX design decisions that could (and maybe should) be done differently. There are many other exciting papers, including an illustrated interview with Amelia Hugill-Fontanel from RIT's Cary Graphic Arts Collection, discussion of best practices in LaTeX document commands creation, articles about fonts, macros, formats, and much more - including a comic asking the important question, ``font or dog breed?''. The next issue will be the proceedings of TUG2021 (August 5--8). Please do not forget to register at https://tug.org/tug2021/, and please send in your presentation proposals before June 24! Speaking of conferences, the next ConTeXt meeting will take place in Bassenge, Belgium, on September 20--25, 2021. See https://meeting.contextgarden.net/ for more details. The deadline for early bird registration discount is July 1. June 1 was also the date of the 2021 Spring release of LaTeX, which shows a good number of enhancements and updates. See LaTeX News #33, https://mirror.ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/base/ltnews33.pdf (or texdoc ltnews33 in TeX Live). In other news, Nelson Beebe released a new bibliography with complete coverage (1988--date) of Learned Publishing: Journal of the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (https://www.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/bib/learnpubl.bib, https://www.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/bib/learnpubl.html). At present there are 2150 articles in the database. New packages on CTAN in May - bjfuthesis, a thesis class for Beijing Forestry University; - bmstu-iu8, a class for writing reports at the IU8 department of IU faculty of BMSTU (Bauman Moscow State Technical University); - codehigh, highlight code and demos with l3regex and lpeg; - coffeestains, add coffee stains to documents; - fontsetup-nonfree, a front-end to fontspec, for selected non-free fonts; - pdfextra, extra PDF features for the OpTeX format; - pgfmath-xfp, define pgfmath functions using xfp; - projlib, a series of tools to simplify your workflow; - tabularray, typeset tabulars and arrays with LaTeX3; - tiscreen, mimic the screen of older Texas Instruments calculators. Happy TeXing! Boris Veytsman TUG President From tug-news at tug.org Sun Jul 4 23:06:04 2021 From: tug-news at tug.org (TeX Users Group) Date: Sun, 4 Jul 2021 15:06:04 -0600 Subject: [tex-announce] Jul21 TUG news: TUG'21, ConTeXt 15, Geschke, OSI, TechSoup, CTAN Message-ID: <202107042106.164L64eR017977@freefriends.org> Dear TeXers, July is a celebratory month here in the US and Canada. I congratulate those who observe these holidays. It is a good time to relax and enjoy the summer. July 9 is the deadline for submitting papers to TUG2021 (August 5--8, https://tug.org/tug2021/). This year our meeting is online, but we hope to return to in-person meetings in 2022. The deadline for submissions for the conference proceedings issue of TUGboat is August 17, and for the fall regular issue is October 15. Submissions are welcome and appreciated any time. The 15th ConTeXt meeting in Bassenge, Belgium, is scheduled for September 20--25, and will be held in person (https://meeting.contextgarden.net/2021/). A recent issue of ACM Communications has an obituary for Chuck Geschke (September 11, 1939--April 16, 2021), a co-founder of Adobe and co-creator of PostScript. It's available publicly at https://doi.org/10.1145/3467481. Geschke was one of the early pioneers of computer typography, highly influential for its development and progress. I mentioned previously that TUG became an Affiliate Member of Open Source Initiative. The recent newsletter of OSI announces this, https://mailchi.mp/15b78315bcdc/summer-2021-newsletter-4928249. Our representative at OSI is Norbert Preining, a TUG Director (among many other hats). Speaking of the non-profit world, TechSoup (https://www.techsoup.org/) generously offered COVID relief for non-profit organizations. I am happy to report that we received a grant from them for a new office laptop, which helped us to retire the old ThinkPad, that served the TUG office well for years, but lately started to crash a little too often. We are grateful for their help. New CTAN packages in June: - acrotex-js, JavaScript files used by acrotex and other packages; - apalike-ejor, BibTeX style for the European Journal of Operational Research; - arabic-book, an Arabic book class; - bangla, a comprehensive Bangla language LaTeX package; - biblatex-cv, create a CV from BibTeX files; - bilingualpages, typeset two columns in parallel; - book-of-common-prayer, support for the style of the Book of Common Prayer; - docassembly, use the Acrobat JavaScript API; - ffcode, fixed-font code blocks formatted nicely; - href-ul, underscored LaTeX hyperlinks; - kdpcover, covers for books published by Kindle Direct Publishing; - minim, a modern plain format for the LuaTeX engine; - minim-hatching, create tiling patterns with the minim-mp MetaPost processor; - minim-math, extensive maths for LuaTeX; - minim-mp, mplib integration with plain LuaTeX; - minim-pdf, low-level PDF integration for LuaTeX; - minim-xmp, embed XMP metadata in PDF with LuaTeX; - nndraw, draw neural networks; - optexcount, python script for counting words in OpTeX documents; - spbmark, customize superscripts and subscripts; - wichura-table, table macros for plain TeX (and LaTeX). Happy TeXing! Boris Veytsman TUG President From tug-news at tug.org Tue Aug 3 23:10:59 2021 From: tug-news at tug.org (TeX Users Group) Date: Tue, 3 Aug 2021 15:10:59 -0600 Subject: [tex-announce] Aug21 TUG news: TUG'21 online shortly, CTAN Message-ID: <202108032110.173LAxN2030356@freefriends.org> Dear TeXers, The most important event of the year for us is not, of course, a series of games in Japan. It is the TUG 2021 meeting, August 5--8. There will be workshops, talks, interviews, tours, presentations and exchanges about TeX, typesetting, typography, fonts and more. This year, as the last one, TUG will be completely online and free. The events are scattered between time zones, so you can always find something close to you. See you there: https://tug.org/tug2021/. This year we will for the first time hold a virtual Annual General Meeting (AGM) on Saturday, August 7, at 18:30 UTC. The proceedings of the meetings will be published in TUGboat; the deadline for submission is August 15, a week after the conference. Nex month, the 15th International ConText meeting will be held in Bassenge, Belgium (in person), September 20--25, 2021; see https://meeting.contextgarden.net/2021/ New CTAN packages in June, from A to X: - aboensis, a late medieval OpenType cursive font; - basiclatex-ru, an introduction to LaTeX, in Russian; - beamertheme-simpledarkblue, a template for a simple presentation; - biblatex-spbasic, a BibLaTeX style emulating Springer's old spbasic.bst; - cartonaugh, a LuaLaTeX package for drawing karnaugh maps with up to 6 variables; - easing, easing functions for pgfmath; - iexec, execute shell commands and input their output; - ifallfalse, compare a string against a set of other strings; - inputnormalization, wrapper for XeTeX's and LuaTeX's input normalization; - macrolist, list operations for LaTeX2e; - newcastle-bst, a BibTeX style to format reference lists in the "Harvard at Newcastle" style; - palette, create palettes for colors and symbols that can be swapped in; - pfdicons, draw process flow diagrams in chemical engineering; - pyluatex, execute Python code on the fly in your LaTeX documents; - strands, draw objects constructed from strands; - texdimens, conversion of TeX dimensions to decimals; - texsurgery, a LaTeX companion to the texsurgery Python project; - thubeamer, a beamer theme for Tsinghua University; - tikz-swigs, horizontally and vertically split elliptical nodes; - to-be-determined, highlight text passages that need further work; - tonevalue, a tool for linguists and phoneticians to visualize tone value patterns; - xistercian, cistercian numerals in LaTeX. Happy TeXing! From tug-news at tug.org Sun Sep 5 00:48:35 2021 From: tug-news at tug.org (TeX Users Group) Date: Sat, 4 Sep 2021 16:48:35 -0600 Subject: [tex-announce] Sep21 TUG news: conferences, Computers&Typesetting Jubilee, CTAN Message-ID: <202109042248.184MmZTL008741@freefriends.org> Dear TeXers, The month of August was special for us: we held the second online TUG conference: https://tug.org/tug2021. It was a resounding success with four days packed with presentations, interviews, lectures, workshops and tours. I am immensely grateful to the people from the organizing committee, session chairs, speakers, attendees -- everybody who made this possible. The TUGboat proceedings issue is being finalized, and the videos will be posted when available on our YouTube channel: https://youtube.com/c/texusersgroup TUG2021 had a rather large number of participants: 406 persons registered for the conference. This is much more than has ever attended a previous meeting. One of the lessons is that we should add an online part to our future (hopefully) in-person conferences. This is the first time we tried to have an informal AGM during the conference. It was an interesting and encouraging experiment, and we nnmay want to develop the rules of online meetings for the unfortunate eventuality of having online-only TUG conferences in the future. One hotly debated topic at the AGM was whether the current four-year terms for TUG directors prevent some people from serving. The Board consensus is that (i) for most (but not all) people it takes several years to fully learn the craft of TUG steering; (ii) nevertheless any director may step down before the end of their term, and even (iii) announce the intention to resign before the full term in their election statement. Speaking of conferences, our friends at DANTE tell us that the Autumn meeting will be held online: https://www.dante.de/veranstaltungen/herbst2021/ The fifteenth ConTeXt meeting will take place in person in Bassenge, Belgium, on September 20--25, 2021: https://meeting.contextgarden.net/2021/ And TeXConf2021 (Japan) will take place online on November 13. The (free) registration deadline is October 9, https://texconf2021.tumblr.com/ The news of another notable conference was communicated by Yannis Haralambous: Grapholinguistics in the 21st century: From graphemes to knowledge, Palaiseau, France, June 8-10, 2022: https://grafematik2022.sciencesconf.org/ It is endorsed by ACL (Association for Computational Linguistics) and by ATypI (Association Typographique Internationale). Submission deadline: January 10th, 2022. In other news, Pearson Publishing has recently released the Jubilee (35th anniversary) printing of Computers & Typesetting by DEK: For the first time, PDF editions are offered as well as hardcover. https://informit.com/tex/jubilee (You have to click around to get to the different formats.) Pearson generously offers TUG members an exclusive 40% discount on either ebook or hardcover (but not both combined) as a membership benefit. Visit https://tug.org/members/ with your TUG login and password to get the discount code. (Join or renew with TUG at https://tug.org/join/.) Finally, here is Knuth's note about the new printings: https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/abcde.html#jubilee Unfortunately, the beloved spiral editions of The TeXbook and The Metafontbook are now out of print: today you have a choice of either Jubilee hardcover or Jubilee PDF. Having been the favorites of many TeXnicians for years, these books now have a chance to become rarities and treasured heirlooms. The deadline for the next (regular) issue of TUGboat is October 15. See https://tug.org/TUGboat/location.html for author information and tips. New CTAN packages in August: - biblatex-lncs, BibLaTeX style for Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science; - etl, expandable token list operations; - gamebooklib, macros for setting numbered entries in shuffled order; - geradwp, document class for the Cahiers du GERAD series; - graphicscache, cache includegraphics calls; - hvlogos, print TeX-related names as logo; - keyparse, key-based parser; - lambdax, use Lambda expression within LaTeX; - makelabels, add a `\makelabels' feature to KOMA-Script letter classes; - mecaso, formulas frequently used in rigid body mechanics; - nchairx, mathematical physics macros from W\"urzburg University; - nwafuthesis, a thesis template package for Northwest A&F University, China; - scrambledenvs, create and print scrambled environments; - smart-eqn, automatic math symbol styling for LaTeX documents; - styledcmd, handling multiple versions of user-defined macros; - tikzbricks, drawing bricks with TikZ; - uni-titlepage, universal titlepages, configurable and with predefined styles; - visualfaq-fr, FAQ LaTeX visuelle francophone; - zref-check, flexible cross-references with contextual checks based on zref. Happy TeXing, Boris Veytsman, TUG president From tug-news at tug.org Sun Oct 3 00:04:57 2021 From: tug-news at tug.org (TeX Users Group) Date: Sat, 2 Oct 2021 16:04:57 -0600 Subject: [tex-announce] Oct21 TUG news: TUGboat, conferences, matrix, C&T Jubilee, CTAN Message-ID: <202110022204.192M4vdn018888@freefriends.org> Dear TeXers Today I got from my mailbox TUGboat 42:2. It is the Proceedings issue, filled with very interesting conference papers on all things TeX, interviews, a map of participants' locations and much more. TUG2021 was a very interesting conference, and the Proceedings issue captured the atmosphere of this event. Speaking of the conference, one issue raised at the AGM was the term length for the directors. We added a clarification to the guidelines at https://tug.org/election/guidelines.html: The standard length of a director's term is four years. If a candidate can foresee not being able to serve for this length of time, it is acceptable to announce, at the time of an election, running for (say) a two-year stay on the board, so voters can be informed. Well, this issue of TUGboat is done---time to think about submissions for the next one. The deadline for that is October 15, but don't hesitate to send in early! More info: https://tug.org/TUGboat/location.html. The month of September had several interesting TeX conferences: DANTE's Autumn Meeting (Online), Saarbr?cken, Germany, Sept. 18, 2021; and 15th ConTeXt Meeting, Bassenge, Belgium, Sept. 20-25, 2021. Among the coming meetings are - TeXConf2021 (Japan, online), November 13, https://texconf2021.tumblr.com/ Deadline for (free) registration: October 9. - Grapholinguistics in the 21st Century: From graphemes to knowledge, Palaiseau, France, June 8-10, 2022, https://grafematik2022.sciencesconf.org/ Submission deadline: January 10, 2022 On another front, some news for the users of Matrix networks (and those interested in new chat-like channels). Henri Menke opened a TUG space at https://matrix.to/#/#tug:matrix.org. Thanks Henri! The Jubilee printing of DEK's Computers & Typesetting is available from https://informit.com/tex/jubilee, both in hardcover and as PDF e-book. All volumes are available in both formats, although not all of A-W's web pages are up to date. There is an exclusive 40% discount for TUG members on either format (though not both simultaneously). Log into the member area of our web site https://tug.org/members/ with your TUG username and password to get the discount code (if you do not know your TUG username and password, please contact memberaccess at tug.org). You may want to check out https://tug.org/books for this and other notable books, book reviews and discounts for TUG members. New CTAN packages in September: - clicks, slide deck animation; - crumbs, add a Navigation Path to the page header; - debate, insert notes in the form of dialogues; - hanzibox, simplify the input of Chinese characters; - linenoamsmath, use the lineno package together with amsmath; - luapstricks, a PSTricks backend for LuaLaTeX; - njuthesis, LaTeX thesis template for Nanjing University; - notocondensed, support for the condensed variants of the Noto fonts; - pdfextra, extra PDF features for OpTeX; - penlight, Penlight Lua libraries made available to LuaLaTeX users; - uwa-colours, the colour palette of The University of Western Australia; - uwa-letterhead, the letterhead of the University of Western Australia; - uwa-pcf, a Participant Consent Form (PCF) for a human research protocol at the University of Western Australia; - uwa-pif, a Participant Information Form (PIF) for a human research protocol at the University of Western Australia; - yamlvars, a YAML parser and tool for easy LaTeX definition creation; - zitie, create CJK character calligraphy practicing sheets. Happy TeXing! Boris Veytsman TUG President From tug-news at tug.org Wed Nov 3 23:02:36 2021 From: tug-news at tug.org (TeX Users Group) Date: Wed, 3 Nov 2021 16:02:36 -0600 Subject: [tex-announce] Oct21 TUG news: TUGboat, conferences, matrix, C&T Jubilee, CTAN Message-ID: <202111032202.1A3M2av5018318@freefriends.org> Dear TeXers Today I got from my mailbox TUGboat 42:2. It is the Proceedings issue, filled with very interesting conference papers on all things TeX, interviews, a map of participants' locations and much more. TUG2021 was a very interesting conference, and the Proceedings issue captured the atmosphere of this event. Speaking of the conference, one issue raised at the AGM was the term length for the directors. We added a clarification to the guidelines at https://tug.org/election/guidelines.html: The standard length of a director's term is four years. If a candidate can foresee not being able to serve for this length of time, it is acceptable to announce, at the time of an election, running for (say) a two-year stay on the board, so voters can be informed. Well, this issue of TUGboat is done---time to think about submissions for the next one. The deadline for that is October 15, but don't hesitate to send in early! More info: https://tug.org/TUGboat/location.html. The month of September had several interesting TeX conferences: DANTE's Autumn Meeting (Online), Saarbr?cken, Germany, Sept. 18, 2021; and 15th ConTeXt Meeting, Bassenge, Belgium, Sept. 20-25, 2021. Among the coming meetings are - TeXConf2021 (Japan, online), November 13, https://texconf2021.tumblr.com/ Deadline for (free) registration: October 9. - Grapholinguistics in the 21st Century: From graphemes to knowledge, Palaiseau, France, June 8-10, 2022, https://grafematik2022.sciencesconf.org/ Submission deadline: January 10, 2022 On another front, some news for the users of Matrix networks (and those interested in new chat-like channels). Henri Menke opened a TUG space at https://matrix.to/#/#tug:matrix.org. Thanks Henri! The Jubilee printing of DEK's Computers & Typesetting is available from https://informit.com/tex/jubilee, both in hardcover and as PDF e-book. All volumes are available in both formats, although not all of A-W's web pages are up to date. There is an exclusive 40% discount for TUG members on either format (though not both simultaneously). Log into the member area of our web site https://tug.org/members/ with your TUG username and password to get the discount code (if you do not know your TUG username and password, please contact memberaccess at tug.org). You may want to check out https://tug.org/books for this and other notable books, book reviews and discounts for TUG members. New CTAN packages in September: - clicks, slide deck animation; - crumbs, add a Navigation Path to the page header; - debate, insert notes in the form of dialogues; - hanzibox, simplify the input of Chinese characters; - linenoamsmath, use the lineno package together with amsmath; - luapstricks, a PSTricks backend for LuaLaTeX; - njuthesis, LaTeX thesis template for Nanjing University; - notocondensed, support for the condensed variants of the Noto fonts; - pdfextra, extra PDF features for OpTeX; - penlight, Penlight Lua libraries made available to LuaLaTeX users; - uwa-colours, the colour palette of The University of Western Australia; - uwa-letterhead, the letterhead of the University of Western Australia; - uwa-pcf, a Participant Consent Form (PCF) for a human research protocol at the University of Western Australia; - uwa-pif, a Participant Information Form (PIF) for a human research protocol at the University of Western Australia; - yamlvars, a YAML parser and tool for easy LaTeX definition creation; - zitie, create CJK character calligraphy practicing sheets. Happy TeXing! From tug-news at tug.org Wed Nov 3 23:46:43 2021 From: tug-news at tug.org (TeX Users Group) Date: Wed, 3 Nov 2021 16:46:43 -0600 Subject: [tex-announce] Nov21 TUG news: Halloween, TUGboat, book review, conferences, CTAN Message-ID: <202111032246.1A3MkhVC026170@freefriends.org> [oops, sorry for the time warp on that last. Guess October wasn't completely behind us after all :). --karl] Dear TeXers, October is behind us. For those of us who miss just finished Halloween celebrations, here are some packages to keep the spirit of the holiday: https://ctan.org/pkg/halloweenmath, https://ctan.org/pkg/realhats. A piece of exciting October news: TUGboat 42:3 is uploaded to the printers. Expect it to hit your mailboxes (real or virtual ones for the electronic subscribers) in due course. Looking ahead, the deadline for submissions for the next issue is March 31. Please consider publishing your ideas and reports about TeX and all things related to typesetting in our journal. (We do not charge any publication fees.) Speaking of printed matter, recently Stefan Kottwitz published the second edition of his Beginner's Guide. Here is a review by LaTeX Ninja: https://latex-ninja.com/2021/10/27/ Interesting conferences in the coming months: - TeXConf2021, Japan, online, Nov 13. https://texconf2021.tumblr.com/ - Grapholinguistics in the 21st Century: From graphemes to knowledge, Palaiseau, France, June 8-10, 2022. Submission deadline: January 10, 2022. https://grafematik2022.sciencesconf.org/ - 16th ConTeXt Meeting: Dreifelden, Germany, Sept. 12-18, 2022. Registration opens May 1, 2022. http://meeting.contextgarden.net/2022/ New CTAN packages in October: - bboldx, extension of the bbold package with a Blackboard Bold alphabet; - bodeplot, draw Bode, Nyquist and Nichols plots with gnuplot or pgfplots; - ccref, crosss referencing with article contraction; - cdcmd, expandable conditional commands for LaTeX; - datestamp, fixed date-stamps with LuaLaTeX; - handoutwithnotes, make handouts with notes from a LaTeX beamer presentation; - lua-widow-control, automatically remove widows and orphans from any document; - lutabulartools, provides some useful commands for tabular matter; - nahuatl, render nahuatl glyphs; - phfcc, convenient inline commenting in collaborative documents; - phfextendedabstract, typeset extended abstracts for conferences, such as often encountered in quantum information theory; - tex-vpat, TeX Accessibility Conformance Report; - tikz-bagua, draw Bagua symbols in Yijing; - truthtable, automatically generate truth tables for given variables and statements; - unicodefonttable, a Unicode font table generator; - zx-calculus, a library to typeset ZX Calculus diagrams. Happy TeXing! Boris Veytsman, TUG President From tug-news at tug.org Sat Dec 4 03:37:28 2021 From: tug-news at tug.org (TeX Users Group) Date: Fri, 3 Dec 2021 19:37:28 -0700 Subject: [tex-announce] : Dec21 TUG news: holidays, TUGboat, obituaries, packages, museums, CTAN Message-ID: <202112040237.1B42bSCj006504@freefriends.org> Dear TeXers! The late autumn and winter is a holiday season for many of us. While this tradition is now adopted by almost all religions and secular people, it is much older and is probably associated with the agricultural rhythms in the Northern hemisphere. I congratulate the TUG members and other TeXers for the holidays, and wish us all a merry season and a safe and fruitful year. Speaking of seasonal gifts, we just received the new issue of TUGboat (42:3, https://tug.org/TUGboat). It is full of very interesting papers on all things TeX and typography related - from a long essay by Charles Bigelow on form, pattern and texture in the typographical image to a cartoon by John Atkinson and a new unit for LuaMetaTeX based on a joke by (then) 19-year-old Knuth. Several papers discuss multilingual processing, including the long-awaited package (created by Frank Mittelbach) to typeset font tables for large Unicode fonts: https://ctan.org/pkg/unicodefonttable. Another piece in TUGboat is the latest LaTeX news, with the description of the second update to LaTeX released in 2021 (version of 2021-11-15). In addition, the previous TUGboat issue, 42:2 (the TUG'21 conference proceedings), is now fully public: https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb42-2/ The season is not only a cause for celebration, but also an occasion to remember those who are, unfortunately, no longer with us. Sadly, in the recent issue of TUGboat there are several obituaries for the people we recently lost: Walter Schmidt, Chuck Geschke, Rog\'erio Brito, Michael Spivak. These people left a lasting imprint in our community. In my column in TUB 42:3 I talked about the continuity of TeX development, and the way our community deals with the change of package maintainers. As if to stress the relevance of the topic, Christian Hupfer recently announced he is dropping the maintenance of his xassoccnt package and welcomes new maintainers to take over this useful code. I already mentioned that until the end of the year Pearson is offering TUG members an exclusive 40% discount for the Jubilee printings of Computers and Typesetting by Donald E. Knuth (see TUG members area, https://tug.org/members/ for the discount code). Recently the PDFs were updated; if you already bought the electronic edition, you may download the updated version at no charge after logging in to the publisher site. Those living in the San Francisco Bay Area might know about the very interesting museum of typography, The Letterform Archive. Recently the museum made their first exhibition, ``Bauhaus Typography at 100'', available online: https://letterformarchive.org/news/view/exhibition-no.1-bauhaus-typography-at-100 New CTAN packages in November: - formal-grammar, typeset formal grammars; - hep-acronym, an acronym extension for glossaries; - hep-bibliography, extension of biblatex for high energy physics; - hep-float, convenience package for float placement; - hep-font, Latin modern extended by computer modern; - hep-math, extended math macros; - hep-math-font, extended Greek and sans-serif math; - hep-text, list and text extensions; - hep-title, extensions for the title page; - luafindfont, search fonts in the LuaTeX font database; - njuvisual, display logos related to Nanjing University; - snaptodo, a todo that snaps to the closer side; - zref-clever, clever LaTeX cross-references based on zref. Happy TeXing to all, Boris Veytsman (TUG President)