[UK-TUG] Speaker meeting summary

[Joseph Wright]

Hello,

Follow last week's meeting, we have now posted videos of all of the
talks to the UK-TUG Vimeo channel (https://vimeo.com/uktug).

*Morning Session*

The day began with informal discussions over coffee: the turnout was
somewhat ‘select’ but we still had a good atmosphere.

Paulo Cereda opened the formal business with a talk via Skype from
Brazil (https://vimeo.com/113328301). Paulo gave us an update on his
build tool arara, bring the story up to date since his presentation in
2012. The talk concentrated on new features in arara 4.0, and why it’s
required a re-write to be in a position to make this available. Paulo
described the challenges of adding new ideas to his tool and why it had
been a longer job than he’d expected.

Simon Dales, UK-TUG Chair, then took up the floor to tell us about his
work using the Doxygen tool for creating documentation for TeX code
(https://vimeo.com/113193068). Simon showed us the advantages of his
approach as well as where he’s had to compromise to get a tool for C
code to understand the very different nature of TeX!

Joseph Wright gave the first of his two talks for the day looking again
at a build tool: l3build (https://vimeo.com/113834342). This tool is
focussed on the needs of package developers, and Joseph showed us how
the LaTeX Project have made both testing and releasing code easier using
the new code.
Afternoon session

After the sandwiches, Joseph gave his second talk, this time looking at
how case changing can be implemented in TeX and follow the rules laid
down by the Unicode Consortium (https://vimeo.com/113830623). He
outlined why TeX primitives can’t do everything that’s needed before
showing an approach recently added to expl3 (although he kept away from
the code!). This talk finished just in time for the formal business of
the day: the AGM.

After lunch and the AGM we moved on to the last talk of the day from
David Carlisle. He showed us the tension between ‘stability’ for LaTeX2e
and the need to fix bugs and work with new engines
(https://vimeo.com/113430065). David explained what areas the LaTeX
Project have been considering addressing, and what problems that work
might solve (and cause!).

Joseph Wright
UK-TUG Secretary