Nov21 TUG news: Halloween, TUGboat, book review, conferences, CTAN

[TeX Users Group]

[oops, sorry for the time warp on that last. Guess October wasn't
completely behind us after all :). --karl]

Dear TeXers,

October is behind us.  For those of us who miss just finished Halloween
celebrations, here are some packages to keep the spirit of the
holiday:  https://ctan.org/pkg/halloweenmath, https://ctan.org/pkg/realhats.

A piece of exciting October news: TUGboat 42:3 is uploaded to the
printers. Expect it to hit your mailboxes (real or virtual ones for the
electronic subscribers) in due course. Looking ahead, the deadline for
submissions for the next issue is March 31. Please consider publishing
your ideas and reports about TeX and all things related to typesetting
in our journal. (We do not charge any publication fees.)

Speaking of printed matter, recently Stefan Kottwitz published the
second edition of his Beginner's Guide.  Here is a review by
LaTeX Ninja:
https://latex-ninja.com/2021/10/27/

Interesting conferences in the coming months:
- TeXConf2021, Japan, online, Nov 13.
  https://texconf2021.tumblr.com/

- Grapholinguistics in the 21st Century: From graphemes to knowledge,
  Palaiseau, France, June 8-10, 2022.
  Submission deadline: January 10, 2022.
  https://grafematik2022.sciencesconf.org/

- 16th ConTeXt Meeting: Dreifelden, Germany, Sept. 12-18, 2022.
  Registration opens May 1, 2022.
  http://meeting.contextgarden.net/2022/

New CTAN packages in October:
- bboldx, extension of the bbold package with a Blackboard Bold alphabet;
- bodeplot, draw Bode, Nyquist and Nichols plots with gnuplot or pgfplots;
- ccref, crosss referencing with article contraction;
- cdcmd, expandable conditional commands for LaTeX;
- datestamp, fixed date-stamps with LuaLaTeX;
- handoutwithnotes, make handouts with notes from a LaTeX beamer presentation;
- lua-widow-control, automatically remove widows and orphans from any document;
- lutabulartools, provides some useful commands for tabular matter;
- nahuatl, render nahuatl glyphs;
- phfcc, convenient inline commenting in collaborative documents;
- phfextendedabstract, typeset extended abstracts for conferences,
  such as often encountered in quantum information theory;
- tex-vpat, TeX Accessibility Conformance Report;
- tikz-bagua, draw Bagua symbols in Yijing;
- truthtable, automatically generate truth tables for given variables
  and statements;
- unicodefonttable, a Unicode font table generator;
- zx-calculus, a library to typeset ZX Calculus diagrams.

Happy TeXing!
Boris Veytsman, TUG President