[tex-announce] : Dec21 TUG news: holidays, TUGboat, obituaries, packages, museums, CTAN

[TeX Users Group]

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)