[Tugindia] April 2016 TUG news: conferences, biblatex survey, TeX Live, TUGboat

[Radhakrishnan CV]

From: tug-news at tug.org (TeX Users Group)
Subject: April 2016 TUG news: conferences, biblatex survey, TeX Live, TUGboat
Date: 5 April 2016 at 3:51:49 AM IST
To: all-tug-members at tug.org

Fellow TeX-ers,

Opening Day of baseball season!  This is starting to get good.

1) First off, the 2016 Annual Meeting will be July 25-27, 2016.  It
will be in Toronto, Canada.  The registration web site is at
http://www.tug.org/tug2016/.

As every year, there will be presentations on new developments with the
TeX family, examples of uses of the software in practice, and many
topics related to the TeX world. Check the latest on the web page
http://tug.org/tug2016/program.html.

We invite and encourage you to give a presentation.  Presentations at
any level, including tutorials, are very welcome.  Visit
http://tug.org/tug2016/cfp.html for information.  The deadline for
abstracts is May 1.

This year the conference will have three special guests. Alphabetically
first is Chuck Bigelow, known to many TeX folks as a designer of the
Lucida and Wingdings font families.  Robert Bringhurst, known to TeXies
for his reference *The Elements of Typographic Style* will also be
there.  In addition, Kevin Larson of Microsoft Advanced Reading
Technologies, who has been influential in improvements to rendering
technologies will be a guest.

In addition to the guests, this year's conference has scheduled a number
of excursions, including a Typography Excursion (at no additional
charge), a baseball game between the San Diego Padres and Toronto Blue
Jays, Niagara-on-the-Lake and Niagara Falls, Guelph, and Georgian Bay.
See http://tug.org/tug2016/excursions.html.

We've reserved rooms for conference participants at the Bond Place
Hotel.  The conference page http://tug.org/tug2016/ has a link to
make online reservations.  The conference rate is guaranteed until
June 25, 2016, but early reservations are always a good idea.

Finally, importantly, the TUG Bursary Fund provides assistance for
members of the TeX community who would, for financial reasons, otherwise
be unable to attend.  If this applies to you, please apply at
https://tug.org/bursary/2016app.html.  The deadline is very soon:
April 8, 2016.

2) Joseph Wright asked us to pass along that the BibLaTeX team have a
survey for users about which backends folks use.  If you are a user,
please see http://www.texdev.net/2016/03/18/biblatex-feedback/ and
please fill out the very brief survey.  (On a personal note, I just
converted a few months ago; this is good software.  Give it a try.)

3) A tentative release schedule for TeX Live 2016 is on the home page
https://tug.org/texlive.  The goal is to have the public release around
the beginning of June.  Thank you to all contributors; more
contributors, including testers, are always welcome; see
https://tug.org/texlive/contribute.html.

4) The 24th yearly GUST BachoTeX conference in 2016 will be held from
April 29 to May 3 in the northeast of Poland.  This is always a good
conference and this year's theme is especially intriguing:

"Since about 5 years a great many tools and publication solutions were
made available with open source licenses.  The up-to now standard of
Corel, Word and InDesign for creating publications is being dropped in
favor of solutions based on HTML, CSS, JS and SVG. A lively open source
life blossoms."

"That situation seems to be overlooked by the TeX community. We are
acting a little bit as if on the `other side' only Windows, Word and
propriety licenses and formats with which no inter-operation is possible
were prevailing. In reality the `other side' has evolved such that there
are many more possibilities for inter-operation than whenever in the
past."

For more, see http://www.gust.org.pl/bachotex/2016-en.

5) The 10th International ConTeXt Meeting conference is scheduled for
September 25--October 1, 2016.  It will be in Kalenberg, The
Netherlands, with this year's theme being *Piece of Cake*.

6) The first 2016 issue of TUGboat should be going to the printer soon!

Happy TeXing,
Jim Hefferon, for the TUG Board