Nov20 TUG news: meetings, TUGboat, reviews, DEK, tutorials, CTAN

[TeX Users Group]

Dear TeXers

November is upon us. I hope you had a great October. Those who
celebrated Halloween had an occasion to use
https://ctan.org/pkg/halloweenmath. It is still not too late to dress up
your equations by saying, for example, \let\sum=\mathwitch and
\let\prod=\bigpumpkin.

GuIT (Gruppo Utilizzatori Italiani di TeX, the official Italian TUG)
just finished its (virtual) meeting: https://www.guitex.org/home/meeting
Congratulations to them!

The last 2020 issue of TUGboat is with the printer.  The deadline for
submissions to the next issue is March 31, 2021.

Speaking of the 41:3 issue of TUGboat, it has Prof. Charles Bigelow's
review of two books by Henrik Vervliet about the illustrious sixteenth
century type designer Robert Granjon. The review is available at
http://tug.org/books/reviews/tb129reviews-vervliet.html. If you decide
to order these books from Oak Knoll, please do not forget about the
discount for TUG members. To get it, log in to https://tug.org/members/
and search for the Oak Knoll coupon code under Member discounts.

To continue the topic of typography and books about typography, here is
an interesting review of the best typography books for designers (thanks
to Dave Walden for finding it):
https://www.typewolf.com/typography-books

New and additional DEK videos have been added to our list at
https://tug.org/interviews/#knuthav. Thanks to Dave Walden and
Shreevatsa R for their contributions.

In other news, a great tutorial about LaTeX3 was recently published by
Alan Xiang:
https://www.alanshawn.com/latex3-tutorial/
Highly recommended for any and all non-expert L3 hackers.

New packages on CTAN in October:

- amiweb2c-guide, a guide for installation of AmiWeb2c;
- association-matrix, LaTeX support for creating association matrices;
- centerlastline, paragraphs with last line centered, known as
  Spanish paragraphs;
- color-edits, colorful edits for multiple authors of a shared document;
- dvivue, a DVI/PDF viewer for Windows;
- frimurer, access to the 'frimurer' cipher for use with LaTeX;
- graphpaper, a LaTeX class to generate several types of graph papers;
- jupynotex, include whole or partial Jupyter notebooks in LaTeX documents;
- latex-firstaid, patches from the LaTeX team for external LaTeX
  packages that need updating to work with new releases;
- ltx2mathml, convert LaTeX math to MathML;
- nnext, extension for the gb4e package used in linguistics;
- otf2woff, OpenType to Woff converter;
- plimsoll, fonts with the Plimsoll symbol and LaTeX support;
- principia, notations for typesetting the Principia Mathematica;
- realtranspose, the `real' way to transpose a Matrix;
- runcode, execute foreign source code and embed the result in the pdf file;
- skills, create proficiency tests;
- startlatex2e, a guide to getting started with LaTeX2e;
- swfigure, insert large images that do not fit into a single page;
- syntaxdi, create railroad syntax diagrams;
- t1subset, a C++ library for subsetting PostScript Type 1 fonts;
- tikz-among-us, reate some AmongUs characters in TikZ environments;
- utfsym, provides various Unicode symbols;
- woff2otf, Woff to OpenType converter;
- xmuthesis, XMU thesis style.

In addition, the dktools package (drawing, graphics conversions, and
more) is no longer on CTAN: over the last few years it has become less
TeX related, and the author has decided to withdraw it from CTAN. The
package remains available at https://sourceforge.net/project/dktools.

Happy TeXing!