Jun22 TUG news: Knuth's music, conferences, tugboat, acm, ctan

[TeX Users Group]

Dear TeXers,

One of the prized items in my collection is the program of the world
premiere of DEK's Fantasia Apocalyptica, his musical interpretation of
the Book of Revelation.  It was performed on the occasion of Knuth's
80th birthday at Studio Acusticum in Pite\aa, Sweden by Jan Overduin on
Wednesday, 10 January 2018.  The description of Fantasia Apocalyptica
can be found here:
https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/fant.html.  The page
includes Knuth's musings, scores, and links to the audio and video
files.

One of the most popular images from the Book of Revelation is the four
horsemen in Chapter 6.  The interpretation of the first horseman is not
universally agreed upon, but many people associate him with
Pestilence.  The other three are named more explicitly: they are War,
Famine and Death.  It seems that since 2018 we have seen world
pestilence and a European war.  Experts worry about at least local
famines caused by this war and the consequent disruption of the export
of wheat.  Of course, these events increase the toll of death among
us.  While the scale of these calamities is relatively limited
compared to the end of world, each individual death is a universal
tragedy, and even the "limited" scale boggles the mind.

Knuth writes that the Book of Revelation is, in his opinion, "totally
mystical and spiritual rather than literal or prophetical. It probably
was written to provide an underground movement (early Christianity)
with some coded messages of hope."  The last part is very important.
Indeed the message we should extract from it and from the world is
hope.

One of the things that make me hopeful is that we continue to work and
create even in these hard times. I am happy to report that the
Polish TeX Group GUST after a long hiatus announces BachoTeX to be held
September 21--25, see https://gust.org.pl/bachotex/2022-en. At the last
BachoTeX in 2019 we helped a group of Ukrainian students to attend. I
hope we can do it again.

Speaking of conferences, the deadline for submissions to our flagship
meeting, TUG 2022, is close: June 15. Please do not forget to register
for the conference. I also strongly encourage you to submit a talk. As
in the two previous years, the conference is virtual and free. See all
the details at https://tug.org/tug2022/. Please note that this
conference will be accompanied by the Annual General Meeting of TUG.

Other important meetings are the DANTE meeting 2022,
Otto-von-Guericke-Universit\"at, Magdeburg, Germany, June 23-25,
https://www.dante.de/veranstaltungen/dante2022,
and the 16th ConTeXt Meeting,
Dreifelden, Germany, Sept. 12-18, 2022,
https://meeting.contextgarden.net/2022/.

In other news, TUGboat 43:1 has been mailed to current TUG members.
Among its papers are a discussion of the Markdown language, tutorials on
l3build and tikz-cd, a review of the long-expected second edition of a
LaTeX beginner's book by Stefan Kottwitz, and much more. Following our
policy, TUGboat issue 42:3 is now open for the general public (the
current issue is available for TUG members only).

Speaking of free journals, ACM has opened its journal archives for
1951--2000; see the discussion here:
https://associationsnow.com/2022/05/the-way-things-were-why-open-access-to-the-acm-digital-library-matters/.

New CTAN packages in May (https://ctan.org/pkg):
- beamerthemeamurmaple, a new modern beamer theme;
- chinesechess, typeset Chinese chess with l3draw;
- fixdif, macros for typesetting differential operators;
- mathsemantics, semantic math commands in LaTeX
- prettytok, prettyprint token lists;
- sidenotesplus, place referenced notes, alerts, figures and tables;
- simpleicons, simple icons for LaTeX;
- srbtiks, the STIX2 font for Serbian and Macedonian;
- symbats3, macros to use the Symbats3 dingbats fonts;
- thermodynamics, macros for multicomponent thermodynamics documents.

Happy TeXing!

-Boris Veytsman (TUG President)