[texhax] Aug17 TUG news: institutional members, conferences, tlcontrib, wikibook

[TeX Users Group]

Dear TeX{}ers!

Another summer (winter for some of us) month is going on.  I hope your
vacations are being refreshing. Some seasonal news from the TeX world.

1) Institutional members of TUG, past, present, and future.

Overleaf and ShareLaTeX have been popular with TeX users around the
world.  In July they announced a merger
(https://www.overleaf.com/blog/518-exciting-news-sharelatex-is-joining-overleaf),
which is exciting news for those who liked features of both platforms.
Both companies have been friends and supporters of the TeX community and
TUG (and longtime institutional members of TUG).  We wish them a happy
marriage and many happy users.

Speaking of institutional members, we are proud to report that the
Association for Computing Machinery has joined TUG.  ACM is a highly
respected society and one of the largest publishers of
computer-related journals and books - many of them typeset with TeX.

The current list of institutional members can be found at
https://tug.org/instmem.html.

Both individual and institutional members are important for TUG's
future.  I would like to ask all TUG members to consider whether their
organizations could join the list at https://tug.org/instmem.html.  If
you work in a place that uses TeX -- a university, a publisher, a
research institution, a school, ... -- then supporting TeX development,
infrastructure and advocacy is the right thing to do for them.  If you
think your organization could become a TUG institutional member, or
donate to our general or special funds, please use your influence to
make it happen as best you can.


2) Several notes for your calendar.

We are glad to announce that a Practical TeX Conference will take place
June 25-27, 2018, at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in
Troy, New York, USA.  We have a special guest: type designer Kris Holmes.
I want to extend special thanks to Michael Sofka who made this
possible.  See the details at https://tug.org/practicaltex2018/.

GuIT (Italian TeX user group) just announced that the 14th annual GuIT
meeting will take place at Mestre (10 km from Venice) on
October 21, 2017 (http://www.guitex.org/home/en/meeting).

Let me also remind you about two conferences mentioned in the previous
newsletters: the 11th ConTeXt meeting, Butzbach-Maibach, Germany,
September 11-17, 2017 (http://meeting.contextgarden.net/2017/) and, of
course, TUG 2018, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, July 20-22, 2018
(https://tug.org/tug2018/). 


3) Some development news.  TeX Live, one of the most popular
cross-platform TeX distributions, has a companion: TLContrib.

TLContrib is intended to carry packages that could not be included in
TeX Live proper for one or another of the following reasons:
    - because it is not free software according to the FSF guidelines;
    - because it is an executable update;
    - because it is not available on CTAN;
    - because it is an intermediate release for testing.
The TLContrib tree bears essentially the same relationship to the core
TeX Live as Debian's non-free tree to the core Debian distribution.

See http://contrib.texlive.info/ for the instructions about adding
TLContrib to your tlmgr repository.

The idea and first incarnation of the repository are due to Taco
Hoekwater.  Norbert Preining has recently revived and extended it.


4) Last but not least.  A recent discussion by the TUG EduTeX working
group (https://tug.org/twg/edutex) concerned LaTeX Wikibook, a popular
learning resource.  While many people successfully use it, its quality
could be improved.  I'd like to make another request to TUG members and
TeX community: please take a look at https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX
and contribute!  Let us make it up to date, accurate and even more
useful.


Thanks and happy TeXing to all,
Boris (TUG President)