[texhax] Sep18 TUG news: tugboat, videos, tug'19

[TeX Users Group]

Dear TeXers!

September is upon us.  In many schools & universities
August--September starts the new academic year, and I wish it to be a
good year for our student and teacher members.  We TeXers are proud of
being helpful in learning and knowledge transfer.

A short personal experience to show this.  I have just returned from
the ACM BCB conference.  As is the custom at ACM conferences, the
participants were given a thumb drive with PDFs of the forthcoming
proceedings.  There were 166 papers, and a quick run of pdfinfo showed
that 107, or 64%, of them were typeset with TeX.  This is close to the
number for the JCDL conference I wrote about in June (67%). Some posters
and slides were also typeset with TeX, but their share seemed to be
smaller.  Perhaps we need to do more to showcase beautiful posters and
presentations made with TeX.

Speaking further of knowledge transfer, we are now in the process of
compiling the third issue of TUGboat for 2018. If you can share your
experience or knowledge, please try to submit your article before
September 30. The instructions for authors are at
https://tug.org/TUGboat/location.html.

The second issue of TUGboat for 2018 (39:2), the TUG 2018 (Rio)
conference proceedings, has been uploaded to the printer and will hit
mailboxes and the Internet in a few weeks. Also, last year's
(TUG at BachoTeX) conference proceedings is now publicly available online:
https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb38-2.

One last related TUGboat item: we are conducting a one-question survey
about changing our policy with respect to TUGboat, making it open access
earlier than the current year-long embargo. If you did not already
submit it, please let us know your opinion:
https://tug.org/TUGboat/survey.html.
We plan to close the survey on September 15.

We made a couple of additions to our web pages. On
https://tug.org/video.html there is a new interview of DEK with the
curators of Computer History Museum, Palo Alto. Here DEK discusses some
of his earliest efforts in computer programming while showing related
program listings and manuals. Meanwhile, on https://tug.org/books/ there
is a new review of the beautiful book ``W.A. Dwiggins: A Life in Design''
by Bruce Kennett.

The TUG 2019 conference will take place in Palo Alto, California, and we
have a very preliminary indication from DEK that he will be able to
visit us. Most likely it will be near the beginning of August; dates and
details forthcoming as we confirm them.

Also, 2019 is the election year. The schedule will be announced in
upcoming newsletters and TUGboat issues, among other places. Please
consider running for the open positions!

There were many interesting additions to CTAN in August, including:

 - tex-locale for localization support,
 - ctanbib setting CTAN entries in bib format,
 - businesscard-qrcode to typeset QR codes on small cards,
 - inline-images to include base64-encoded images in TeX documents,
 - worksheet for easy creation of worksheets,
 - returntogrid for grid typesetting,
 - plautopatch for patches for (u)pLaTeX,
 - jigsaw for drawing jigsaw puzzles,
 - rank-2-roots for drawing rank 2 root systems,
 - ucsmonograph for typesetting according to the specifications
   of the University of Caxias do Sul (UCS) in Brazil.

Happy TeXing!
Boris Veytsman (TUG President)