Apr20 TUG news: health, conferences, TUGboat, TeX Live, stickers, CTAN

[TeX Users Group]

Dear TeXers

We are trying to live in the new world shaped by the global pandemic.
I hope all of us are safe and doing what we can to fight it.
I have written a column about it for TUGboat.  This column is
available now at https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb41-1/tb127pres.pdf.

We are actively exploring the options for TUG 2020 and the AGM. 
As promised, we will announce the decision before the middle of May.
Of course, in the event of TUG'20 cancellation we will refund any
registration fees.

The grapholinguistics conference organized by Yannis Haralambous,
mentioned in the last newsletter, will still take place from June 17-19,
but now entirely by video. Extended description:
  https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb41-1/tb127haralambous-grapholinguistics.pdf
Conference page:
  https://grafematik2020.sciencesconf.org/

We also decided to extend the early bird deadline for joining or
renewing TeX membership till April 30; please visit
https://tug.org/join.html. Thanks so much to everyone who has already
joined or renewed this year.

I am glad to report that TeX activities continue even in these hard
times.

The new issue of TUGboat (https://tug.org/TUGboat) is almost done, and
should start mailing next month. However, disruptions in the global
logistics systems due to the pandemic will affect the delivery of the
physical copies of the journal. The mailing company is dealing with the
problem on a much larger scale than our little TUGboat, as you can
imagine, so it's expected to all happen in due time.

TeX Live 2020 and the entire TeX Collection is undergoing the last tests
before the public release. For news on the impending release, see
https://tug.org/texlive/pretest.html. As with TUGboat, there will be
some unknowable delay in the delivery of physical DVDs.

Those attended TUG 2019, or read the proceedings, might recall Martin
Ruckert's presentation about his HINT project, regarding a new TeX for
mobile devices. For those who may be interested, his web site for the
project recently went public at http://hint.userweb.mwn.de.

I would like to remind everyone about the stickers and other TeX-branded
merchandise available at
https://www.redbubble.com/people/texusersgroup/shop.  If you are stuck
in quarantine and want to make a present to a TeX aficionado in your
life, this might be a good idea for you.

New packages on CTAN in March:

- autofancyhdr, automatically compute headlength for fancyhdr package
- biblatex-ajc2020unofficial, BibLaTeX style for the Australasian
    Journal of Combinatorics
- biblatex2bibitem, convert BibLaTeX-generated bibliography to \bibitems
- expkv-def, a key-defining frontend for expkv
- expose-expl3-dunkerque-2019, using expl3 to implement numerical algorithms
- git-latexdiff, call latexdiff on two Git revisions of a file
- hitszbeamer, a beamer theme for Harbin Institute of Technology, ShenZhen
- langsci-avm, attribute-value matrices and feature structures for use
    in linguistics
- lua-uca, Unicode Collation Algorithm library for Lua
- lua-ul, underlining for LuaLaTeX biblatex-german-legal, comprehensive
    citation style for German legal text
- oops, a framework for making definitions, typically mathematical and inline
- rest-api, describing a REST api
- shortmathj, automatically shortify titles of mathematical journals
- tikz-planets, illustrate celestial mechanics and the solar system
- xepersian-hm, fixes kashida feature in xepersian package
- yquant, typesetting quantum circuits in a human-readable language

Happy TeXing - and stay safe!

-- 
Good luck
Boris Veytsman, TUG President