Mar19 TUG news: election result, tex live, conferences, ctan

[TeX Users Group]

Dear TeXers,

The nomination period for the TUG President and Board has ended.
The following nominations were received:

1. Boris Veytsman, TUG president (sole candidate)
2. Barbara Beeton, TUG board
3. Jim Hefferon, TUG board
4. Norbert Preining, TUG board

We received fewer nominations than vacant positions, and according to
Rule 4.6 of the election procedures (https://tug.org/election/elecproc.pdf),
all candidates nominated are declared elected without a formal ballot.
The new board after the AGM will be:

 	Barbara Beeton     Karl Berry         Johannes Braams
 	Kaja Christiansen  Jim Hefferon       Taco Hoekwater
 	Klaus H\"oppner    Frank Mittelbach   Ross Moore
 	Norbert Preining   Arthur Reutenauer  Will Robertson
 	Boris Veytsman     Herbert Vo\ss

I congratulate the new and renewing officers. I also want to express my
thanks to the members of the board: Susan DeMeritt, Cheryl Ponchin and
Michael Doob. Your many years of dedicated service to the community are
gratefully acknowledged. The changes in board membership will take
effect with this year's AGM, as always.

In other news, TeX Live 2018 is frozen as the new and shiny TeX Live
2019 is being tested before the release. Your help in testing would be
greatly appreciated! Please see https://tug.org/texlive/pretest.html.
Thanks to the TL team for their work on the distribution.

The call for papers at BachoTeX has been published. The theme this year
is "TeX old but gold: the durability of typographic TeXnologies"
inspired by a great anniversary---TeX turned 40 last year. The deadline
for "regular" abstracts and other proposals is March 24th 2019.
The deadline for final papers to appear in the conference materials is
April 14th. See http://gust.org.pl/bachotex/2019-en for the details.

As a reminder, TUG 2019 will take place in August in Palo Alto; see
https://tug.org/tug2019/.  Our Annual General Meeting will be held
during the conference.

There were several new packages on CTAN in February:

* alpha-persian, Persian version of alpha.bst
* bxjaholiday, support for Japanese holidays
* commedit, a package to typeset commented editions with LaTeX
* cuprum, cuprum font family support for LaTeX
* elegantbook, an Elegant LaTeX Template for books
* elegantnote, elegant LaTeX Template for notes
* euflag, a command to reproduce the flag of the European Union
* ftc-notebook, typesetting FIRST Tech Challenge (FTC) notebooks
* gammas, the official documentclass for GAMM Archive for Students (GAMMAS)
* gitver, a package to get the current git hash of a project and typeset it
* glossaries-estonian, Estonian language module for glossaries package
* poormanlog for computing logarithms and powers with (almost) 9 digits
* pxjodel, support to change metrics of fonts from japanese-otf
* realhats, a package to put real hats on symbols
* ryersonsgsthesis, Ryerson School of Graduate Studies thesis template
* scratch3 for drawing programs like "scratch" (the package scratch is
  now declared obsolete)
* technion-thesis-template, a thesis template for the Technion graduate school
* tex-fpc, a collection of change files for a TeX system based on Free Pascal
* tikz-truchet for drawing Truchet tiles
* windycity, a Chicago style for BibLaTeX

Happy TeXing!
Boris Veytsman