Nov19 TUG news: science and twitter, reviews and exhibits, CTAN

[TeX Users Group]

Dear TeXers,

October had a very interesting GuIT meeting
(https://www.guitex.org/home/meeting) in Turin, Italy.  I was not able
to attend, but I enjoyed interesting tweets from the event.

It looks like Twitter has become the social medium of choice for the
sci-tech audience. There are now studies of interaction between
scientists through Twitter. The immediacy of Twitter combined with the
immediacy of preprint servers is well aligned with the fast pace of
knowledge growth. To publish a (TeX-based!) preprint on arXiv and to
tweet about it is the 21st-century equivalent of sending a letter about
your research to Henry Oldenburg or Marin Mersenne in the 17th century.
I am happy that TeX plays an important role in this sequence.

Speaking of Twitter, our handle is @TeXUsersGroup; you may find it
useful to follow it.

In other news:

- Barbara Beeton's review of Hermann Zapf and the World 
  He Designed: A Biography, by Jerry Kelly, is available online at:
  https://tug.org/books/

- Letters & Lives: Typography work of Bigelow & Holmes, an exhibit at
  the Arts Center Gallery of Nazareth College in Rochester, New York,
  USA, will be showing until November 22, 2019.
  https://www2.naz.edu/events/4318/

- TUGboat 40:3 has been sent to the printer; you may find it in your
  mailbox after a couple more weeks. The deadline for submissions for the
  next issue is March 31; as always, any TeX and typography topics are
  welcome.   https://tug.org/TUGboat/

New packages on CTAN in October:
- accessibility, a CTAN-compliant version of the accessibility package
  to generate tagged and structured PDF files;
- bxjatoucs, convert Japanese character code to Unicode;
- circledsteps, typeset circled numbers;
- gindex, a package for formatting indexes;
- imfellflowers, IM Fell Flower OpenType fonts;
- kblocks, easily typeset Control Block Diagrams and Signal Flow Graphs;
- latino-sine-flexione, LaTeX support for Peano's Interlingua;
- pdftex-djgpp, an MSDOS-DJGPP binary of the pdfTeX engine;
- pst-turtle, turtle graphics with PSTricks;
- quiz2socrative, prepare questions for socratic quizzes;
- xkcdcolors, xkcd names of colors.

Happy TeXing!
Boris Veytsman (TUG President)