[texhax] Oct17 TUG news: discussions, new members, new fonts

[TeX Users Group]

Dear \TeX{}ers,

It is now October, the month of Canadian Thanksgiving, Halloween,
Oktoberfest and other celebrations.  Have great Fall festivals!

There were several notable events in the last weeks.  Brian Dunn
started an interesting discussion about the finances and the future of
TUG and the TeX community; see the threads on the TeXHaX list:
https://tug.org/pipermail/texhax/2017-September/thread.html,
https://tug.org/pipermail/texhax/2017-October/thread.html.  I invite
other \TeX{}ers to join: we definitely need new ideas about promotion
of TeX and TUG.

TUG'18 and PracTeX'18 published invitations to sponsors:
https://tug.org/tug2018/sponsor.html,
https://tug.org/practicaltex2018/sponsor.html.  Please consider
whether your organization would like to participate.

Speaking of organizations, I am pleased to announce that Nagwa
(https://www.nagwa.com), an education technology startup aiming to help
students around the globe, has become our newest institutional member.
Welcome aboard!  The current list of institutional members, and
information about joining, can be found at https://tug.org/instmem.html.

I still remember the old times when a TeX document could use any font,
provided that it was Computer Modern.  The situation has changed; by now
we have many free (and non-free) fonts of high quality.  During the last
several weeks CTAN (and thence TeX Live and MiKTeX) got several new
exciting fonts.

- Bob Tennent published Coelacanth, inspired by the famous
Centaur font (may I remind you about the book about Centaur by Jerry
Kelly and Misha Beletsky, recently reviewed in TUGboat,
http://tug.org/books/#kelly-beletsky ).

- Herbert Voss submitted the spark-otf package supporting Spark fonts,
useful for creation of sparklines (for more info, may I also refer you to
https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb38-2/tb119veytsman-sparklines.pdf ), and the
dejavu-otf package, with Dejavu fonts and support, in TrueType/OpenType.

- Andrew Cashner submitted musicography, which makes available a number
of musical symbols to pdf(la)tex users.

- A number of fonts have been updated as well: newtx and
xcharter by Michael Sharpe. And ... a new interview with Michael has just
been published at https://tug.org/interviews/sharpe.html. 

- Theppitak Karoonboonyanan updated Thai fonts in the fonts-tlwg package.
https://ctan.org/pkg/fonts-tlwg

- The indispensable fontspec & unicode-math packages by Will Robertson got
another set of updates too.

Looks like free font development is quite vibrant; thanks to all font
designers and TeXnicians for their great work.

Happy \TeX{}ing to all,
Boris Veytsman (TUG president)