[tex-announce] Apr22 TUG news: war, Robin Fairbairns, TeX Live, LaTeX, font fashion

[TeX Users Group]

Dear TeXers

I opened the last letter with the news about a war in Europe. I am so
sad to start another letter under a continuing barrage of reports about
immense human suffering, including very troubling messages about rapes,
killed children, unspeakable atrocities and looting. World War I was
labeled "the war to end all wars", which now seems to be a cruel irony.
After the cruelty of World War II we said "never again" - just to allow
this abomination to repeat again, and again, and again. The suffering of
Ukraine, which since the beginning of the 20th century has been the
place of two world wars, a civil war, a large famine, terror campaigns,
and now is a victim of cruel aggression, is mind boggling - as well as
the resilience of its people with the courage to fight and the strength
to rebuild their country time and again.

Many technical and scientific societies such as APS and AMS have started
programs to help their Ukrainian colleagues affected by the war.  We
are also thinking about ways to help.  I hope to announce them
soon. Meanwhile, if you need assistance - or have an idea how TUG can
help - please get in touch with us directly.

Also an individual loss: we are very sad about the death of one of the
founders of CTAN, a great TeXnician and friend Robin Fairbairns. There
are obituaries online at
https://www.latex-project.org/news/2022/03/16/robin-fairbairns/ and
https://funeral-notices.co.uk/notice/fairbairns/5024136
and a memoriam will be published in the upcoming TUGboat issue.

In TeX news. The TeX Live and MacTeX teams have made the respective
releases for 2022. There are a number of interesting updates, perhaps
most notably the new engine by Martin Ruckert, named hitex, which
outputs a reflowable HINT format designed for mobile devices.
Martin has published several papers in TUGboat and the literate CWEB
implementation is available as several related books, as well as online.
https://tug.org/TUGboat/Contents/listauthor.html#Ruckert,Martin
http://hint.userweb.mwn.de/

The LaTeX team has put out a pre-release version for the 2022 June
release (included in TeX Live) and testing would be greatly appreciated,
most conveniently by running the pdflatex-dev or xelatex-dev or
lualatex-dev commands. Information about the changes:
https://www.latex-project.org/news/2022/03/21/latex-dev-2022-1/

Also, I would like to remind everyone about the TUG 2022 conference
scheduled to take place online from July 22-24, 2022. June 15 is the
deadline for abstracts (see https://tug.org/tug2022/). Please submit
presentation proposals! Other notable upcoming meetings:

- Grapholinguistics in the 21st Century, Palaiseau, France, June 8-10,
   2022 (https://grafematik2022.sciencesconf.org/),

- DANTE meeting 2022, Otto-von-Guericke-Universität, Magdeburg,
   Germany, June 23-25, 2022
   (https://www.dante.de/veranstaltungen/dante2022)

- 16th ConTeXt Meeting: Dreifelden, Germany, Sept. 12-18, 2022
   (http://meeting.contextgarden.net/2022/)

For font lovers, the I Love Typography website announced Font Fashion
Week, a brand new series of free online events to celebrate the latest
trends in type design,
https://ilovetypography.com/2022/03/17/font-fashion-week/

Finally, new CTAN packages in March:

- annotate-equations, easily annotate math equations using TikZ;
- beamertheme-arguelles, simple, typographic beamer theme;
- functional, provide an intuitive LaTeX2 interface for expl3;
- hvpygmentex, Syntax-Highlighting of program code;
- ieejtran, unofficial bibliography style file for the Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan;
- jieeetran, unofficiaL BibTeX style for citing Japanese articles in IEEE format;
- jmsdelim, a package for compositional delimiter sizing;
- letgut, class for the La Lettre GUTenberg newsletter of the French TeX
  user group GUTenberg (https://gutenberg-asso.fr)
- liftarm, draw liftarms;
- luaaddplot, an extension to pgfplots' \addplot macro;
- messagepassing, draw diagrams to represent communication protocols;
- njustthesis, thesis template for the Nanjing Univ. of Science and Technology;
- robotarm, TikZ-powered LaTeX package to draw parameterized 2D robot arms;
- seu-ml-assign, Southeast University Machine Learning Assignment template;
- vntex-nonfree, URW Classico and URW Garamond extended for Vietnamese.

Happy TeXing!
Boris Veytsman, TUG President