Dec20 TUG news: CTAN+fun, books+reviews, calendar, election

[TeX Users Group]

Dear TeXers,

The holiday season is upon us.  Best wishes to everybody, and let's
have festive celebrations and start a great year.

It is a sad duty to remind everybody to be safe this holiday season
and postpone most human contacts until next year.  Hopefully the
success of medicine will make 2021 much better than 2020, and we will
be able to return to normal life, with its hugs and kisses,
friendly dinners and carefree meetings.  I guess this is one of the
most wished for things today.

If you need some cheering up (and who does not?), some CTAN packages
may help: https://ctan.org/pkg/xii, https://ctan.org/pkg/xii-lat,
https://ctan.org/pkg/happy4th, https://ctan.org/pkg/tikzducks,
https://ctan.org/pkg/tikzlings, https://ctan.org/pkg/tikzmarmots,
https://ctan.org/pkg/bearwear, and, of course,
https://ctan.org/pkg/scsnowman.

Peter Wilson created his traditional gift to the community: Japanese
wood block calendars for 2021; see https://tug.org/calendar.

Some book news.

We published a review of the 2nd edition of the famous SIAM book
"Learning LaTeX" by David F. Griffiths and Desmond J. Higham
(http://tug.org/books/#learning-latex2).

The book "Future of Text" may be interesting for our
community (and some of the community members contributed to it).  Get
it for free from https://futuretextpublishing.com/.

Edward Tufte published a new book in his series, titled "Seeing With
Fresh Eyes: Meaning, Space, Data, Truth"; see
https://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/seeing-with-fresh-eyes.

The current issue of TUGboat has probably been received by the most
subscribers.  Let me remind you that the electronic versions of all
previous issues, including the TUG 2020 proceedings, are now open for
the general public.  The deadline for the next issue is March 31 - we
are eager for your contributions about all things TeX!

A reminder and request for donations, as usual for December:
contributions to TUG are tax deductible in the US, and you can donate at
https://tug.org/ (just click the "Donate" button). If you wish to join
us as a member, so much the better! Membership dues are also tax
deductible less the value of benefits.

Finally, 2021 will be an election year for TUG. If you are interested in
running for a position, please see https://tug.org/election.

New CTAN packages in November:
- causets, draw causal set (Hasse) diagrams;
- datax, import individual data from script files;
- first-packages, a short list of go-to LaTeX packages, aimed at a beginner;
- mluexercise, exercises/homework at the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg;
- muling, class for writing MA thesis at the Department of Linguistics, University of Mumbai;
- orcidlink, insert hyperlinked ORCiD logo;
- rojud, a font with the images of the counties of Romania;
- semesterplanner, create beautiful semester timetables and more.

Happy TeXing!
Boris Veytsman, TUG President