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Bio for Tristan Miller

I was first bitten with the publishing bug in fourth grade when I discovered the desktop publishing program The Newsroom for the Commodore 64. Fascinated, I decided at once to produce a class newspaper and, with the help of my schoolmates, saw the publication of some half-dozen issues of The Okie-Dokie Journal and The Mini-Post over the next two years (circulation: 35). My illustrious career continued throughout my high school years, when I served as editor and layout artist of our school's literary journal and of a local computer users' group.

Despite my long association with desktop publishing, I was a fairly late comer to the TeX scene. My first encounter with Knuth's famous system came when I was a graduate student in 2001; as part of a directed readings course I was obliged to compose a lengthy essay and typeset it in LaTeX. I was so impressed with LaTeX's flexibility and with the quality of its output that I never again used a word processor for writing.

Though I am far from a LaTeX expert, I read voraciously on the subject, being a dedicated follower of the comp.text.tex newsgroup and the various TUG journals. I'm also fairly adventurous, never letting my lack of experience get in the way of solving my typography-related problems. I'll readily dive into long-unmaintained source code or play tricks with the antiquated BibTeX stack language in order to get things to work the way I want.

I am currently working as a researcher and digital archivist for the Socialist Party of Great Britain. My research interests include latent semantic analysis, information retrieval, document engineering, Web standards, and social informatics. In the near future I hope to start writing my doctoral thesis on the history, philosophy, and economics of Free Software.

For more information on me or my work, visit my personal web page or my academic page.