[texhax] Oct18 TUG news: conferences, tugboat, new packages

[TeX Users Group]

Dear TeXers,

This October newsletter comes to you very late. The reason is, I have
been in Odessa, Ukraine, for the last several weeks. Among other
vacation activities I've spent some time with the teachers and students
of Odessa National University, my alma mater.

While TeX was not the primary topic of our discussions, I could not
help noticing that most of the various typeset materials -- lecture notes,
slides, papers, ... -- were done in TeX.  The level of our presence in
academia worldwide is astounding. I felt both proud and wondering
whether we are not doing the most to attract these users to TUG.

Among the TUG-related news the most important one is probably the fact
that the Rio de Janeiro Proceedings issue of TUGboat (39:2) is being
delivered to the members.  We are wrapping up the last (regular)
issue for 2018. The deadline for the first 2019 issue is March 31.
https://tug.org/TUGboat/

The next TUG is scheduled in Palo Alto, CA, USA, August 9--12, 2019.
See you there. As usual, the conference will be accompanied by the
TUG Annual General Meeting.

Finally CTAN has several new packages (as usual!). In alphabetical order:

- aeb-minitoc for mini-tocs

- bxwareki for conversion of dates from Gregorian to Japanese calendar

- chs-physics-report for physics reports according to the style of
Carmel High School, Indiana, USA

- coloremoji for direct inclusion of color emojis in LaTeX

- firamath and firamath-otf for sans serif Fira font (with math support)

- hybrid-latex for using active Python code in TeX documents

- kalendarium for printing dates of a classical Roman calendar

- kvmap for creation of Karnaugh maps with LaTeX

- libertinus-type1, libertinus-otf and the wrapper package libertinus
for the refactored support of the Libertinus font family

- metapost-colorbrewer, an implementation of the colorbrewer2.org
colours for MetaPost

- pst-feyn for drawing Feynman diagrams in PSTricks

- pst-lsystem for creating images according to the L (Lindenmayer) system

- pst-marble for drawing marble paper in PSTricks

- ptex-manual, the manual for Japanese ptex

- quantikz for drawing quantum circuit diagrams in TikZ

- utexasthesis for University of Texas at Austin graduate thesis style

- widows-and-orphans to identify widow and orphan lines

Most are in TeX Live, and all can be found via: https://ctan.org/pkg/

Happy TeXing!
Boris Veytsman (TUG President)