[UK-TUG] Speaker meeting and AGM summary

[Joseph Wright]

Dear Member,

The annual Speaker Meeting and AGM took place yesterday at Trinity 
College, Oxford. We had a mix of talks and discussion as well of course 
the AGM. The talks were recorded: see the links below or browse at 
https://vimeo.com/uktug.

Morning Session
---------------

We kicked off this year with two videos from our Brazilian connection, 
Paulo Cereda. Paulo first talked about using code snippets in vim 
(https://vimeo.com/241331501), making the business of writing LaTeX 
documents more efficient. He then moved on to look at using TeX 'in the 
wild', in particular making bingo cards using TeX 
(https://vimeo.com/241332536).

Paulo is on the committee for  TUG 2018 (https://tug.org/tug2018/), so 
we took the opportunity to talk with him about planning for next year. 
Paulo told us that Lua will be a key topic: many TeX users will know 
that Lua has it's origins in Brazil. The organisers of TUG 2018 also 
want to ensure that tutorials and other student-friendly aspects are 
central.

The morning continued with Joseph Wright speaking about two 
LaTeX3-related topics. First, Joseph talked about recent work by the 
LaTeX team on making regexes available in expl3 
(http://vimeo.com/241338025). These offer a powerful approach to pattern 
matching, and should give cleaner code (at least when used correctly!). 
He then looked briefly at ongoing work to port existing LaTeX2e graphics 
support to `expl3 (https://vimeo.com/241339985), and how there are still 
a few unresolved areas to consider.

The final talk of the morning came from Jonathan Fine. Jonathan looked 
at what useful information a keen student would find if told to 'use 
LaTeX for your maths work' https://vimeo.com/241342209. This led him to 
some expected and some less expected websites!

Afternoon session
-----------------

We decamped for food to a local restaurant, where conversation ranged 
over TeX topics and well beyond. Returning to the venue, the formal 
business of the day was completed: draft minutes for the AGM are attached.

Our final talk came from David Carlisle of the LaTeX team . David talked 
about how the team are seeking to update aspects of the kernel to work 
with user expectations, largely about filenames: dots, spaces and UTF-8 
support (https://vimeo.com/241345469). David also highlighted an updated 
math mode guide coming from the AMS. (Please email 
joseph.wright at morningstar2.co.uk to request a copy of the latter.)

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: AGM-minutes-2017.pdf
Type: application/pdf
Size: 58915 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://tug.org/pipermail/uktug-announce/attachments/20171105/165c1a3e/attachment-0001.pdf>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: AGM-minutes-2017.tex
Type: text/x-tex
Size: 2363 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://tug.org/pipermail/uktug-announce/attachments/20171105/165c1a3e/attachment-0001.bin>