[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: browse https://vimeo.com/uktug later 
today (by which time I hope to have uploaded them).

Before Lunch
------------

Informal discussions took us from arrival to around half-ten, by which 
time we'd found where the coffee was in the meeting room! Our first 
formal presentation came from Paulo Cereda, in the form of a video from 
Brazil. Paulo talked about his build too, arara, which reached version 4 
earlier this year. There was a lively discussion following Paulo's talk, 
ranging over the complexities of choosing an implementation language to 
how to gauge the size of his user base.

Sticking with a Brazilian flavour, Joseph Wright then gave us an 
overview of the TUG2018 meeting, which he'd gone to (and which Paulo 
helped to organise). Joseph told us about the formal business as well as 
the wider social 'feel' of the meeting. One key question which came up 
in Rio, and which is very much relevant to UK-TUG, is the question 'What 
are user groups for?': we returned to that topic during our own AGM.

Peter Kirby then told us about how he'd got interested in typesetting 
Russian, with the personal connection being of course vitally important. 
He explained how he'd worked with pdfTeX and an English keyboard to 
typeset a Russian wordlist. This led to a lively discussion about the 
quality (or otherwise) of documentation, what is a 'reasonable' 
expectation for detailing requirements in code guides, and other issues 
for end users.

We then moved to a talk by Simon Dales, who creates the binary builds 
for TeX Live on Raspberry Pi (helped by some hardware bought by UK-TUG). 
He gave us an insight into the issues which are unique to the Pi: a 
focus on being small and inexpensive means that the build process is 
long, and things like the useful life of an SD card come into play.

Our final talk was from Nicky Talbot, who illustrated some intriguing 
issues in document security. She showed how even with restricted 
settings, a malicious file can destroy source files, and moved on to 
give ideas on how new settings could address this vulnerability.

Lunch and after
---------------

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: the AGM. Attached are draft minutes, 
and any feedback should come to the Secretary 
(joseph.wright at morningstar2.co.uk), or of course to the 'announce' list.

The meeting broke up after the AGM, to allow time for the committee to meet.


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