TUG Interview Corner

This Interview Corner is coordinated by Dave Walden, who has spent a lifetime in computer R&D but who is a relative newcomer to TeX and its friends (albeit a serious user of them, cf. TeX Land). Thus, Dave is representative of many relatively new users of TeX who are interested in knowing more about past and current contributors to the TeX community.

Interview subjects are chosen based on (a) seeking diversity in many dimensions, (b) recommendations from people about who should be interviewed, and (c) potential interview subjects being willing to be interviewed. If you'd like to suggest subjects for future interviews, or are interested in conducting interviews yourself, please contact us.

Please contact us if you see a problem with this website. [A program generates the HTML for the website and the interviews, based on the system of m4 files described in our paper about this interviews project.]

Interviews

The list is alphabetical by last name. The one or two activities listed for each interviewee are meant as just a hint about each interviewee and are accurate as of the date of the interview.

A chronological list of interviews is also available.
This page also lists some other interviews, memoirs, etc. and some histories of TeX.

• Kaveh Bazargan and CV Radhakrishnan (interview completed 2006-09-21);
  Kaveh Bazargan and CV Radhakrishnan use TeX extensively in their typesetting business.
• Barbara Beeton (interview completed 2005-11-24);
  Barbara Beeton has been editor of TUGboat for 22 years and a member of the TUG Board since it was called the steering committee. She also serves as a liaison for TeXnical issues between Donald Knuth and the TeX community.
• Karl Berry (interview completed 2005-09-27);
  Karl Berry has been a long-time board member of TUG, became TUG president in 2003, and was subsequently elected for further terms. Among other projects, he is co-administrator of the tug.org server, co-editor of TeX Live, and a member of the TUGboat production team.
• Duane Bibby (interview completed 2006-05-19);
  Cartoonist Duane Bibby is well known for the lion illustrations used in numerous TeX books, starting with The TeXbook, and by TeX user groups.
• Jon Breitenbucher (interview completed 2008-05-22);
  Jon Breitenbucher is interested in the use of TeX in educational situations and is a member of the TUG board.
• Mimi Burbank (interview completed 2005-09-06);
  Mimi Burbank is a member of the TUGboat production team and past member of the TUG board.
• David Carlisle (interview completed 2007-06-20);
  David Carlisle is a member of the LaTeX team and deeply involved with issues of typesetting and displaying mathematics, including being an Invited Expert on the W3C Math Working Group.
• Lance Carnes (interview completed 2004-12-13);
  Lance Carnes founded Personal TeX, Inc., in 1985 and has been providing PCTeX ever since.
• CV Radhakrishnan and Kaveh Bazargan (interview completed 2006-09-21);
  Kaveh Bazargan and CV Radhakrishnan use TeX extensively in their typesetting business.
• Bart Childs (interview completed 2010-05-10);
  Bart Childs was extensively involved in the early distribution of TeX and early governance of TUG.
• Jin-Hwan Cho (interview completed 2007-05-21);
  Jin-Hwan Cho is the maintainer of the DVIPDFMx translator, and a leader in supporting and encouraging the use of TeX in Korea.
• Malcolm Clark (interview completed 2011-02-09);
  Malcolm Clark is a past president of TUG.
• John Culleton (interview completed 2006-12-02);
  John Culleton uses TeX in his indexing and typesetting business. He also participates in various Internet-based discussion groups related to printing and publishing where he is vocal about using TeX for typesetting.
• Susan DeMeritt and Cheryl Ponchin (interview completed 2007-10-11);
  Cheryl Ponchin and Susan DeMeritt are both members of the TUG Board of Directors (Sue is secretary of the board), give workshops on LaTeX, and use TeX daily in their technical typing work.
• Victor Eijkhout (interview completed 2005-03-21);
  Victor Eijkhout is the author of the book TeX by Topic and several LaTeX packages, a long-time participant on comp.text.tex and various mailing lists, and was formerly associate TUGboat editor for macros.
• Thomas Esser (interview completed 2006-06-05);
  Thomas Esser created and maintained the popular teTeX distribution of TeX.
• Robin Fairbairns (interview completed 2005-02-16);
  Robin Fairbairns maintains the TeX FAQ and the UK CTAN node. He is also a member of the LaTeX Project team.
• Jonathan Fine (interview completed 2008-12-14);
  Jonathan Fine is a long time participant in the TeX community. He is current chair of the UK TeX Users Group and is employed supporting TeX at the Open University.
• Ulrike Fischer (interview completed 2009-11-20);
  Ulrike Fischer is very active in various on-line TeX discussion groups and has written several chess-related packages.
• Peter Flynn (interview completed 2006-09-19);
  Peter has worked on TeX interfaces at many levels for many years, including SGML, XML, dual web and print presentations, within the context of excellent typography. He is also a past board member of TUG.
• David Fuchs (interview completed 2007-05-14);
  David Fuchs is renowned in the TeX community for his work with Donald Knuth in the earliest days of TeX.
• Peter Gordon (interview completed 2008-01-08);
  Peter Gordon is the editor at Addison Wesley for Donald Knuth's books and the company's TeX and LaTeX books.
• George Grätzer (interview completed 2005-04-13);
  George Grätzer is a mathematician who has written books on TeX and LaTeX and edits a journal prepared in LaTeX.
• Eitan Gurari (profile compiled in July 2009; Eitan died before we could do an interview);
  Eitan Gurari was a long term contributor to the TeX community. He was on our list to interview, but we had not gotten to him yet at the time of his death. This profile was compiled after his death.
• Hans Hagen (interview completed 2006-03-02);
  Hans Hagen is the principal author and developer of ConTeXt, past president of NTG, and active in many other areas of the TeX community.
• Idris Hamid (interview completed 2009-11-01);
  Idris is best known in the TeX community for his work in developing better typesetting for Arabic-script languages such as Arabic, Persian, and Urdu.
• Hàn Thế Thành (interview completed 2008-07-24);
  Hàn Thế Thành is the creator of and still maintains pdfTeX.
• Yannis Haralambous (interview completed 2009-01-06);
  Yannis Haralambous is well known for his Omega system and his study of non-Latin fonts.
• Jim Hefferon (interview completed 2007-08-13);
  Jim Hefferon is one of the key maintainers of CTAN and a member of the TUG board.
• Amy Hendrickson (interview completed 2008-09-14);
  Amy Hendrickson has made her living for over twenty years as a TeX/LaTeX macro writer for publishing companies and academic societies; she also does book production and teaches LaTeX.
• John Hobby (interview completed 2010-01-05);
  John Hobby was the developer of MetaPost and helped develop the Metafont algorithms.
• Taco Hoekwater (interview completed 2006-10-13);
  Taco Hoekwater is heavily involved in implementing many significant upgrades and improvements to various TeX-based systems.
• Klaus Höppner (interview completed 2005-02-20);
  Klaus Höppner is the president of DANTE, the German TeX user group and a member of the TUG board.
• Bogusław Jackowski and Janusz Marian Nowacki (interview completed 2008-09-27);
  Bogusław Jackowski and Janusz Marian Nowacki have made and continue to make many important contributions in the world of TeX fonts.
• David Kastrup (interview completed 2006-08-21);
  David Kastrup is a frequent contributor to comp.text.tex and manifestly a TeXnician (see the answer to Exercise 1.1 in The TeXbook).
• Oleg Katsitadze (interview completed 2007-08-04);
  Oleg Katsitadze maintains Eplain and is a contributor to Texinfo.
• Jonathan Kew (interview completed 2007-04-03);
  Jonathan Kew is best known in the TeX community as the developer of XeTeX.
• Dick Koch (interview completed 2007-07-12);
  Dick Koch is the creator and lead developer of TeXShop, a renowned front end for TeX on MacOSX.
• Werner Lemberg (interview completed 2006-04-28);
  Werner Lemberg developed the CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) package for LaTeX and has been involved in a number of other computer-based typesetting projects.
• Raph Levien (interview completed 2009-05-16);
  Raph Levien is a programmer with a special interest in graphics applied to type. He is also a typeface designer. He holds several patents and is a past maintainer of Ghostscript.
• Frank Liang (interview completed 2010-07-28);
  Frank Liang worked with Don Knuth on the hyphenation algorithm for TeX78, and Frank's PhD thesis presented a better hyphenation algorithm that was used in the TeX we know today and has been used by many other typesetting systems.
• Dan Luecking (interview completed 2004-11-08);
  Dan Luecking's answers on comp.text.tex are models of precision.
• David MacKay (interview completed 2009-02-10);
  David MacKay is a scientist at Cambridge University and an enthusiastic user of LaTeX.
• Pierre MacKay (interview done in early 2007);
  Pierre MacKay is a classics professor who was a TUG board member from 1983–1991, TUG president from 1983–1985, and Unix site coordinator from 1983–1992. He was with TUG from the start. Unfortunately, long term commitments prevented him from completing this interview.
• Adriana McCrea and Aleksander Simonic (interview completed 2006-06-28);
  Aleksander Simonic and Adriana McCrea are the “WinEdt team” that develops and supports the WinEdt editor popular with many MS Windows users of TeX.
• Frank Mittelbach (interview completed 2006-01-11);
  Frank Mittelbach has been the leader of the LaTeX Project for many years.
• Ross Moore (interview completed 2007-12-12);
  Ross Moore is a long-time TUG board member and TeX contributor, especially in the areas of mathematics and Unicode support.
• Janusz Marian Nowacki and Bogusław Jackowski (interview completed 2008-09-27);
  Bogusław Jackowski and Janusz Marian Nowacki have made and continue to make many important contributions in the world of TeX fonts.
• Arthur Ogawa (interview completed 2008-07-14);
  Arthur Ogawa is a long time member of the TUG board and well-known package developer.
• Haruhiko Okumura (interview completed 2007-06-04);
  Haruhiko Okumura promotes and supports the use of TeX in Japan.
• Richard Palais (interview completed 2011-07-09);
  Dick Palais was the first president (then called the chairman) of TUG.
• Steve Peter (interview completed 2006-02-07);
  Steve Peter is a publisher and linguist, does freelance book design and typesetting, and uses TeX daily. He is also a member of the TUG board.
• Michael Plass (interview completed 2009-12-20);
  Michael Plass was co-implementor of the original prototype for TeX.
• Cheryl Ponchin and Susan DeMeritt (interview completed 2007-10-11);
  Cheryl Ponchin and Susan DeMeritt are both members of the TUG Board of Directors (Sue is secretary of the board), give workshops on LaTeX, and use TeX daily in their technical typing work.
• Norbert Preining (interview completed 2011-04-10);
  Norbert is deeply involved in the TeX Live and Debian TeX development.
• Sebastian Rahtz (interview completed 2009-03-12);
  For 15 years, Sebastian Rahtz was involved in an amazing variety of TeX and TUG activities.
• Arthur Reutenauer (interview completed 2009-03-03);
  Arthur Reutenauer is the president of Groupe francophone des utilisateurs de TeX (GUTenberg) and is active in other aspects of TeX use and development.
• Yuri Robbers (interview completed 2008-08-24);
  Yuri Robbers is a TeX user and is a production editor for The PracTeX Journal as well as maintaining the journal's web site.
• Will Robertson (interview completed 2007-03-25);
  Like many graduate students, Will Robertson has gotten involved with TeX; he is also representative of a minority of such TeX-using graduate students who take the next step of contributing significantly to the TeX community.
• Tomas Rokicki (interview completed 2008-08-15);
  Tom Rokicki created dvips and TeX's original Pascal to C converter.
• Christian Schenk (interview completed 2006-04-15);
  Christian Schenk is the author and principal developer of the popular MiKTeX distribution of TeX.
• Rainer Schöpf (interview completed 2007-08-27);
  Rainer Schöpf was a co-founder of the LaTeX2e and CTAN projects, and is still a key maintainer of CTAN.
• Herb Schulz (interview completed 2011-02-01);
  Herb Schulz is well known for the support he gives to users in the MacTeX world.
• Aleksander Simonic and Adriana McCrea (interview completed 2006-06-28);
  Aleksander Simonic and Adriana McCrea are the “WinEdt team” that develops and supports the WinEdt editor popular with many MS Windows users of TeX.
• Nicola Talbot (interview completed 2007-05-25);
  Nicola Talbot is a LaTeX user, teacher, and package writer.
• Phil Taylor (interview completed 2005-05-25);
  Philip Taylor is a long time TeX user/developer who chooses to work outside of the LaTeX framework. He is also a member of the TUG board.
• Christina Thiele (interview completed 2005-03-24);
  Christina Thiele has been typesetting with TeX since 1983, especially in linguistics and other non-math/science fields. She is a past president of TUG.
• Luis Trabb Pardo (interview completed 2010-04-08);
  Donald Knuth has said that Luis Trabb Pardo was his “right hand man” for the development of TeX78.
• Howard Trickey (interview completed 2010-03-23);
  Howard Trickey did one of the earliest ports of TeX to Unix.
• Boris Veytsman (interview completed 2011-01-19);
  Boris Veytsman has written and maintains many LaTeX and font-related packages and recently joined the TUG Board of Directors.
• Herbert Voß (interview completed 2010-08-31);
  Herbert is best known for his work with PSTricks and his German language books documenting LaTeX, etc.
• Dave Walden (interview completed 2006-09-20);
  Dave Walden coordinates the TUG Interview Corner. This interview of him is intended to provide an answer to the question some readers may have: “Who is this guy and why is he interviewing TeX luminaries?”
• Joe Weening (interview completed 2010-06-08);
  Joe Weening used TeX78 when he was first at Stanford, participated in the transition to TeX82, and continues to use (La)TeX today.
• Gerben Wierda (interview completed 2006-11-28);
  Gerben Wierda is well known for his tools for installing TeX and other capabilities on MacOSX systems.
• Peter Wilson (interview completed 2006-11-08);
  Peter Wilson is the author of the well-known memoir class, has been involved with the development of several other classes, and has worked extensively with fonts. In the photo he is operating a Chandler & Price 1910 old style hand press and is in the process of inserting a sheet of paper to print on the second side.
• Joseph Wright (interview completed 2009-10-21);
  Joseph is a relatively new arrival to the world of TeX development, particularly working in the area of improving LaTeX support for chemistry. He also is a member of the LaTeX3 team.

Some interviews, memoirs, etc., in TUGboat and elsewhere

• November 2011 interview of Enrico Gregorio, by Paulo Cereda
• January 2012 interview of Werner Gründlingh by Paulo Cereda
• December 2011 interview of Martin Scharrer by Paulo Cereda
• November 2011 interview of Thomas Titz by Paulo Cereda

About Claudio Beccari

• An interview of Claudio Beccari was published in the journal of Greek TeX Friends, the Greek TeX local users group.
  About Barbara Beeton
• Presidential words about Barbara Beeton, TUGboat, Volume 20 (1999), No. 3, Proceedings of the 1999 Annual Meeting.
  About Donald Knuth
• June 2011 interview of Knuth by BCS editor Justin Richards
• Peter Seibel's book, Coders at Work (published in 2009), has a chapter on Donald Knuth: the book's website
• April 28, 2008 interview of Donald Knuth by Andrew Binstock for informIT.
• 97 short videos of Donald Knuth recounting his history at the Peoples Archive and dated 2007-06-06; his work with TeX is described in parts 7 and 8, videos 50-70.
• Donald Knuth, Interviewed by Donald J. Albers and Lynn A. Steen, Mathematical People: Profiles and Interviews, Donald J. Albers and G. L. Alexanderson, editors, Birkhauser, Boston, 1985, pp. 182-203.
• An interview with Donald Knuth, November 1991, TUGboat, Volume 13 (1992) No. 4, pp. 419-424.
• Questions and answers with Prof. Donald E. Knuth (TUG'95), TUGboat, Volume 17 (1996), No. 1, pp. 7-22.
• Amsterdam, 13 March 1996 — Knuth meets NTG members, TUGboat, Volume 17 (1996), No. 4.
• Questions and answers with Prof. Donald E. Knuth (CSTUG, Charles University, Prague, March 1996), TUGboat, Volume 17 (1996), No. 4.
• DDJ chats with one of the world's leading computer scientists, Dr. Dobb's Journal, April 1996.
• Interview: Donald Knuth, interview conducted by Raph Levien, TUGboat, Volume 21 (2000), No. 2, pp. 103-110.
• Question & Answer Session with Donald Knuth (U.K. TUG, Oxford, September 12, 1999), TUGboat, Volume 22 (2001), No. 1/2, pp. 15-19.
• The Art of Don E. Knuth, a profile by Mark Wallace, Salon, September 16, 1999.
• Rewriting the Bible in 0s and 1s, a profile of Donald Knuth by Steve Ditlea, Technology Review, September/October 1999.
• Donald Knuth: All Questions Answered (University of Oslo, 30 August 2002), TUGboat, Volume 23 (2002), No. 3/4, pp. 249-361.
• Donald Knuth, Founding Artist of Computer Science, audio interview by David Kestenbaum, National Public Radio, March 2005.
• Love at First Byte, Donald Knuth profile in Stanford Magazine May/June 2006 issue.
• Panel discussion with Hermann Zapf and Donald Knuth, reported by Taco Hoekwater, EuroTeX 2005 proceedings.
• My collaboration with Don Knuth and my design work, Hermann Zapf, TUGboat, Volume 22 (2001), No. 1/2, pp. 26-30.
• Interview with Donald E. Knuth, interview conducted by Gianluca Pignalberi, TUGboat, Volume 26 (2005), No. 3, pp. 183-185.
  About Helmut Kopka
• Helmut Kopka, 1932–2009 by Patrick W. Daly
  About Leslie Lamport
• How (La)TeX changed the face of mathematics: An E-interview with Leslie Lamport, interview conducted by Gunter M. Ziegler, TUGboat, Volume 22 (2001), No. 1/2, pp. 20-22.
• A Discussion with Leslie Lamport, interview conducted by Dejan Milojicic in IEEE Distributed Systems Online 3, 8.
  About Barry MacKichan
• An interview with Barry MacKichan of MacKichan Software and Scientific WorkPlace.
  About Stephen Moye
• A wayward wayfarer's way to TeX, by Stephen Moye, TUGboat, Volume 28 (2007), No. 2, pp. 153-158.
  About George Williams
• Oral interview with George Williams, developer of FontForge; written version of the same interview.
  About Herman Zapf
• Panel discussion with Hermann Zapf and Donald Knuth, reported by Taco Hoekwater, EuroTeX 2005 proceedings.
• Laudatio for Professor Hermann Zapf, Frank Mittelbach, TUGboat, Volume 22 (2001), No. 1/2, pp. 24-26.
• My collaboration with Don Knuth and my design work, Hermann Zapf, TUGboat, Volume 22 (2001), No. 1/2, pp. 26-30.
• The Lifestory of Hermann Zapf, by Hermann Zapf, at the Linotype website.

• A Brief History of TeX, Philip Taylor, TUGboat, Volume 17 (1996), No. 4, pp. 367-381
• The (La)TeX project: A case study of open source software, Alexandre Gaudeul, TUGboat, Volume 24 (2003), No. 1, pp. 132-145
• Just What Is TeX?
• The definitive history of Donald Knuth's involvement with TeX is his book Digital Typography.
• A panel discussion involving Knuth and all but one of the key Stanford graduate students who helped him develop TeX was held at the TUG 2010 convention in San Francisco.