Jan23 news: tug'23, election, tikzlings, museum of printing, mastodon, ctan

[TeX Users Group]

Dear TeXers

I would like to share with you the toast we had at the recent
celebration of the New Year.  We drank wishing for 2022 to be the
worst year for us all.  I hope to see a better future for us in 2023.

One of the most important events of 2023 for the TeX Users Group is, of
course, the TUG meeting.  This year we will try to make it in person.
It will take place at Hotel Collegium Leoninum, Noeggerathstrasse 34,
53111 Bonn, Germany, on July 14-16 with a developers' workshop on the
tagging of pdf documents on July 13. Registration form and all the
information are posted at the usual place:
  https://tug.org/tug2023/

There is a firm hotel reservation deadline of April 1.  The deadline
for abstracts is April 10, and early bird registration discount ends on
April 15.  Also, it seems that airline tickets for the summer are quickly
selling out, so members outside Europe might want to buy theirs early.
The TUG Annual Meeting will take place during the conference.

2023 is an election year for TUG. The terms of President and eight other
board members are open. The deadline for nominations is March 1, 2023.
All the information:
  https://tug.org/election/

It would be remiss of me not to mention one of the brightest
events of December, The Great Tikzlings Christmas Extravaganza 2022:
  https://vimeo.com/780457002

Submissions for the first TUGboat issue of 2023 are accepted until March 26.
As one of the editors of the journal I have the privilege to read
the articles in advance; one of the most interesting is the column by
Barbara Beeton.  In this column she mentions the conversation between
Frank Romano and Matthew Carter at the Museum of Printing.  The
conversation is available on YouTube in three parts:
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXFdNLPEC9s
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LvOPG5KosiA
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k60MjUhBeDA

By the way, the YouTubeChannel of the Museum of Printing is quite
interesting, and you might want to subscribe to it at
https://www.youtube.com/@museumofprinting.   I assume you already
subscribed to our own channel at https://www.youtube.com/@texusersgroup.
Speaking of social media, we decided to add to our Twitter presence
(@TeXUsersGroup) the one in the Mastodon Fediverse
(@TeXUserGroup at techhub.social).  We also set up a crosspost link
between these accounts.

Jonathan Fine asked us to remind everyone about the special issue of
his TeX hour about TeX accessibility, scheduled for January 19,
https://texhour.github.io/2023/01/19/stem-access-author-reader/.
Among other topics it will discuss recent developments at arXiv,
see https://info.arxiv.org/about/accessibility_research_report.html
and https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.07286.

New CTAN packages in December:

- bibcop, style checker for .bib files;
- blopentype, a basic LuaTeX OpenType handler;
- digestif, editor plugin for LaTeX, ConTeXt, etc.;
- gradient-text, decorate text with linear gradient colors;
- hfutexam, exam class for Hefei University of Technology (China);
- ibrackets, intelligent brackets;
- jourcl, cover letter for journal submissions;
- luacomplex, operations on complex numbers inside LaTeX documents using Lua;
- luagcd, computation of gcd of integers inside LaTeX using Lua;
- luamaths, standard mathematical operations inside LaTeX documents using Lua;
- luamodulartables, generate modular addition and multiplication tables;
- luaset, set operations inside LaTeX documents using Lua;
- maze, generate random mazes;
- namedtensor, macros for named tensor notation;
- pdfmsym, PDF Math Symbols - various drawn mathematical symbols;
- pst-flags, draw flags of countries using PSTricks;
- pythonimmediate, library to run Python code;
- resmes, measure restriction symbol in LaTeX;
- scikgtex, mark research contributions in scientific documents and
  embed them in PDF metadata;
- tikz-mirror-lens, spherical mirrors and lenses in TikZ;
- tsvtemplate, apply a template to a tsv file;
- ukbill, a class for typesetting UK legislation;
- xput, declarative desktop publishing with LaTeX.

Happy TeXing!

Boris Veytsman
TUG President