[tex-announce] Jun23 news: new TUGboat issue(s), conferences, TLC3, GPT, CTAN

[TeX Users Group]

Dear TeXers

A couple days ago I got a new issue of TUGboat, online here:
https://tug.org/TUGboat/Contents/contents44-1.html
Fascinating reading. An interesting coincidence: this issue has several
papers on the history of typesetting: a conversation between Matthew
Carter and Frank Romano, an extensive study on the prehistory of digital
fonts by Jacques Andr\'e, a look into the history and future of LaTeX by
Frank Mittelbach, and discussion of the state of ConTeXt by Hans Hagen,
as well as the musings at the Museum of Printing by Barbara Beeton.
There are also many interesting papers on all things TeXnical, book
reviews, and many others.

As usual, this means that the previous issue of TUGboat is open for
the general public - see
https://tug.org/TUGboat/Contents/contents43-3.html.

The summer is traditionally a time for conferences:
the DANTE AGM on July 13 (https://www.dante.de/veranstaltungen/dante2023/),
then TUG'23 on July 14-16 (https://tug.org/tug2023/),
both in Bonn, Germany,
and then the ConTeXt meeting in Sib\v{r}ina, Czech Republic, Sept. 10-16
(http://meeting.contextgarden.net/2023).

John D Lamb has reviewed The LaTeX Companion, Third Edition, available
at https://tug.org/books/reviews/tb137reviews-mittelbach-tlc.html.
There is a discount for this book if purchased through the link
https://tug.org/books.

Many in the TeX community are discussing the use of large language
models (LLMs). It is interesting that these models can produce passable
TeX code. For example, when asked to write TeX code for the sum of
geometric progression, ChatGPT gave
  \[ S = \frac{{a(1 - r^n)}}{{1 - r}} \]. 
It also gave 
  \[ e^{i\theta} = \cos(\theta) + i\sin(\theta) \]
when asked to show the Euler formula.

An interesting take by Dan Nexon on LLMs in humanities can be found here:
https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2023/06/chatgpt-and-the-classroom.
Those of us who are teaching (and reading students' homework
assignments) might heed this discussion.

Summer is the time for vacations. I wish those of us who take the time
for travel, fun and relaxation a good time, and recharging - and
interesting meetings to those of us who decided to spend some time in
TeX and other conferences.

New CTAN packages in May:
- adobeornaments, using ornaments in Adobe Fonts with LuaLaTeX or XeLaTeX;
- codedescribe, a minimalist set of commands (expl3-based) to describe
  document and class-level commands/functions;
- counterz, additional tools for counters;
- glossaries-norsk, Norsk Bokm\aa{}l language module for the glossaries
  package;
- huffman, drawing binary Huffman trees with MetaPost and METAOBJ;
- movement-arrows, drawing movement arrows on linguistic example sentences;
- ptlatexcommands, a package that translates common LaTeX commands
  to Portuguese;
- starray, a structured array (of properties) based on expl3;
- sympycalc, work with SymPy and PyLuaTeX;
- tikz2d-fr, work with some 2D TikZ's command (french);
- tikz3d-fr, work with some 3D figures;
- unicode-math-input, allow entering Unicode symbols in math formulas;
- unifront, give notes a unique front page for every chapter and section.

Happy TeXing,
Boris Veytsman, TUG President