[UK-TUG] A New Year's Message and Invitation

[Jonathan Fine]

Dear Fellow Member

This evening we'll increment the year counter. Like birthdays, an important
symbolic event. A time to look back, and forward. The present crisis in UK
TUG has its roots in mostly gradual changes over the last 25 years. This
crisis is also an opportunity to renew the TeX community and its tools.

Every Thursday evening, from 6:30 to 7:30pm UK time, I'll host a TeX /
LaTeX Office Hour. All TeX users are welcome, especially beginners. They'll
continue at least until the end of March 2021.

Zoom details
https://us04web.zoom.us/j/78551255396?pwd=cHdJN0pTTXRlRCtSd1lCTHpuWmNIUT09
Meeting ID: 785 5125 5396
Passcode: knuth

My fear is not that UK TUG is dissolved, or that its money is wasted. My
fear is that we miss and close off the opportunity to renew TeX. Succeed,
and the future of TeX in STEM and elsewhere can be assured for the next 30
years. Fail, and TeX will become a niche product well removed from the
mainstream of authoring and publishing. With dwindling use as legacy
print-only publishing systems are replaced. Is this a binary choice, or is
there a middle ground?

When it was created, TeX was something of a miracle. There was nothing like
it. High quality, almost bug free, solving a difficult problem, and running
on ordinary PCs (say 10 MHz, 2 MB and 40 MB). I still have confidence in
TeX, and it's still central to math, physics and similar research.

Looking forward, TeX has problems. Many arose from after TeX was frozen (at
version 3) in 1989. For example, creating accessible PDF via TeX isn't yet
practical. PDF was introduced in 1993. Similarly, the first release of HTML
was in 1993. Python was first released in 1991, Lua in 1993, Ruby and
Javascript in 1995. Perl goes back to 1987.

These are not problems in TeX's fundamental typesetting algorithms. Rather,
they are problems and opportunities in document transformation at the input
side, and rendering of typeset material on the output side. At present our
use of TeX depends on enormous amounts of software written in the TeX macro
language. I fear that this is an emerging weak point and fault line.

Put simply, LaTeX is written in what is now an obscure and specialised
language. As our community ages, we have to think about renewal. Here
there's a fork in the road. Keep developing LaTeX forever, or freeze it as
it is and develop a replacement in a more modern language such as Python or
Ruby or Lua. Or even Haskell, as used by Pandoc.

We're still waiting for widespread easy and reliable conversion of LaTeX
source documents into formats such as XML and HTML. And in web pages,
MathJax has the same dominance for mathematical content that TeX had for
print, since about 1990. Without a standard for LaTeX mathematics, this is
a potential fault line.

Understanding the experience of users, particularly beginners, is a vital
part to the renewal of the TeX community. Also vital is the experience and
loyalty of existing TeX users and developers. Hence the zoom TeX / LaTeX
Office Hour, every Thursday 6:30 to 7:30pm UK time, until the end of March
2021.

Here's that URL again:
https://us04web.zoom.us/j/78551255396?pwd=cHdJN0pTTXRlRCtSd1lCTHpuWmNIUT09

Happy TeXing and Happy New Year

Jonathan Fine
https://jfine2358.github.io/
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