[texhax] Aug18 TUG news: tug18, accessibility, social media, new packages

[TeX Users Group]

Dear TeXers!

Last month we held TUG2018 in Rio de Janeiro. It was a great success;
many thanks to Paulo Ney de Souza, Paulo Cereda, IMPA and all the local
organizers for this! The talks were very interesting, and Rio is
definitely a great city to visit. The excursion to Sugarloaf was
definitely worth it, and the venue was great. This conference featured
several workshops: a LaTeX workshop (in Portuguese), a knitr workshop,
and an accessibility workshop. In my opinion this was useful for many
people. Perhaps we should plan to use this format more often in the
future.

We have published links to the videos of the talks at
https://tug.org/tug2018/program.html

Another interesting event of TUG'18 was the vote for the best talk.
The winner was `A short introduction to the TikZducks package' by
Susanne Raab (presented by Paulo Cereda).  The second place was split
between Will Robertson's `Unicode fonts with fontspec and unicode-math'
and Tom Hejda's `yoin-Yet another package for automation of journal
typesetting'.  Many other conferences have held a competition for
the best talk; perhaps we should make this a TUG tradition also.

New TUG outreach: we are now on Facebook and Twitter! Our
Facebook page is https://www.facebook.com/TeXUsersGroup/ and our Twitter
handle is @TeXUsersGroup .

CTAN got a couple of new packages related to accessibility:
 - tagpdf by Ulrike Fischer and
 - axessibility by Anna Capietto, Sandro Coriasco, Tiziana Armano,
   Nadiz Murru, Alice Ruighi, Eugenia Taranto, Dragan Ahmetovic,
   Cristian Bernareggi, and Michele Berra.
By the way, the authors of the accessibility packages participated
in the workshop at TUG'18 -- some remotely.  Again, many thanks
to the Brazilian organizers who made this possible. If you'd like to get
involved or stay up to date with accessibility efforts, please join the
working group at https://tug.org/twg/accessibility.

Some of the other new packages on CTAN:
 - clrstrip for drawing colour strips.
 - etsvthor for members of study association of Electrical Engineering
   at Eindhoven University of Technology,
 - hyperbar for adding interactive barcode fields to PDF forms,
 - mathfont for using TrueType and OpenType fonts in math mode,
 - pdfpc-movie for producing hyperlinks to movies,
 - penrose for producing Penrose tilings,
 - pst-contourplot for drawing implicit functions with PSTricks,
 - statistics for typesetting statistics tables and graphics,
 - stoneipa supporting the Stone Sans Phonetic font,
 - tikz-nef for drawing diagrams of neural networks,
 - tikz-network for complex network theory diagrams,
 - TikZmarmots extending the famous TikZducks, 
 - TOPletter for writing letters according to the rules of Politecnico
   di Torino,
 - xfakebold for fake bold letters,

Happy TeXing!