TUG 2020: July 24-26, 2020
The 41st Annual Conference of the TeX Users Group

Post-conference:

• proceedings (TUGboat 41:2);
• videos for all presentations;
• preprints and slides;
• Zulip chat instance remains open.

Conference registration and information

Conference venue: online via Zoom

• Main zoom link (with chat).
• Stream in a web browser.
• Stream via youtube (there is an unavoidable short delay from the live stream).
• More conference information, notably about the social rooms.

• Call for papers.
• List of participants and presentations.
• Information for creating an online presentation.
• LaTeX workshop.

Dates and deadlines

• June 24 - deadline for abstracts for presentation proposals.
• July 10 - deadline for preprints to be in the program.
• July 24-26 - conference.
• August 3 - deadline for final papers for the printed TUGboat proceedings.

Keynotes: Steve Matteson, John MacFarlane

• We are very happy to announce that Steve Matteson of Monotype has agreed to give a keynote address, “The Road to Noto”. Steve is the designer of Open Sans, Droid, Liberation, Noto Sans for Latin, and many more typefaces, and has worked on a vast array of other typographic projects.
• We are equally happy that John MacFarlane has also agreed to give a keynote presentation, on Pandoc for TeXnicians. John, a professor of philosophy at UC Berkeley, is the creator of the remarkable Pandoc and a whole lot more.

Organization

The conference will be held online via Zoom. Thanks to the University of Adelaide, Australia, for making this possible.

We envision a schedule somewhat similar to a physical conference, with talks of approximately 30-40 minutes, time for q&a, and several breaks throughout the day. Given the global nature of an online conference, the talks will be extended throughout each day, according to the speakers' locations, rather than focused on one timezone. We expect that talks will be recorded and available for viewing afterwards.

We request that all participants and speakers register for the conference. It is free of charge, though donations are most welcome to help defray expenses and to support TeX and TUG.

We dearly hope it will be possible to have the 2021 conference (physically) at RIT, as had been planned for this year.

Volunteers needed

For this first online TUG conference, we especially need lots of help for it to go well. Some of the jobs we know we'll need volunteers for:

• Introducers for some speakers and to manage the chat. Ideally someone with some knowledge of the subject of the talk. It will be the job of this person to parse the messages on the chat and present a small set of questions to the speaker.
• Managers for the break rooms and/or social events.
• A/V coaches for the speakers. We will have a short manual with recommendations and best practices, minimal requirements, hardware, etc. But beyond this, the best to maximize the chance of a good talk, purely on the technical side, is to have a one-to-one with the speakers in advance about their A/V setup: displaying slides, good audio, good visual frame, headphones and/or a good microphone to avoid feedback, etc.

(No) Annual General Meeting

Although an annual general meeting of members has been part of prior TUG conferences, the TUG Board has elected not to have an official AGM at this year's online conference, per the bylaws. This first-time online conference is already taxing all available volunteers to capacity, while a membership meeting is quite a different proposition from anything else being organized for the conference. So it is unfortunately not feasible to arrange. Naturally we hope and expect that there will be an AGM at next year's conference.

Why Zoom?

There have been good arguments in the media and circulated in articles online that there are problems with Zoom's front-end software and architecture. We did not pick Zoom as the platform for TUG2020 without recognition of these flaws.

With only a couple short months between the cancellation of the face-to-face TUG2020 and the dates of the event, we needed to be pragmatic about our choice of conference streaming/hosting software. As well as philosophy we also needed to worry about price. We chose not to charge a fee to participate in TUG2020 to encourage attendance, and TUG cannot afford large investments of time or licensing costs to implement or pay for robust solutions for once-off events.

A Zoom webinar license is being used through an institutional sponsor to host TUG2020. This allows up to 500 attendees, a scale which we cannot match with alternative no-cost solutions. It is worth noting that a Zoom webinar is different than a Zoom meeting; only presenters have the ability to share their own video and screen. Attendees of the conference will not need to install software that they do not wish to, as Zoom has an alternative web browser interface and live streams will also be provided via YouTube.

We have our own concerns about the security of Zoom, but a conference is, almost by definition, about sharing information. Nothing we are broadcasting at the meeting is something we are trying to keep secret—quite the contrary!

If TUG2021 is held online we will revisit this decision with more time to plan and the experience of lessons learned in TUG2020.

Sponsors

Sponsored by the TeX Users Group, DANTE e.V., Adobe, the Cary Graphic Arts Collection at the Rochester Institute of Technology, Overleaf, STM Document Engineering Pvt Ltd, University of Adelaide, Australia, and individual donors. Thanks to all.

Thanks to Jennifer Claudio for designing the poster for the online conference.

Contact

• Email: tug2020@tug.org.
• Phone, fax, postal mail: see TUG office contact information.
• Conference committee: Karl Berry, Jennifer Claudio, Rohit Goswami, Robin Laakso, Ross Moore, Norbert Preining, Will Robertson, Paulo Ney de Souza, Boris Veytsman.