Jun21 TUG news: TUGboat 42:1, TUG'21, LaTeX release, CTAN

[TeX Users Group]

Dear TeXers,

I've just received my issue of TUGboat (42:1). Among interesting
materials in the issue is DEK's report of the 2021 TeX tuneup
accompanied by the description of the TeX entomology process by Karl
Berry, and (in the aptly named section ``Dreamboat'') a look backward by
Barbara Beeton about TeX design decisions that could (and maybe should)
be done differently. There are many other exciting papers, including an
illustrated interview with Amelia Hugill-Fontanel from RIT's Cary
Graphic Arts Collection, discussion of best practices in LaTeX document
commands creation, articles about fonts, macros, formats, and much more
- including a comic asking the important question, ``font or dog breed?''.

The next issue will be the proceedings of TUG2021 (August 5--8). Please do
not forget to register at https://tug.org/tug2021/, and please send in
your presentation proposals before June 24!

Speaking of conferences, the next ConTeXt meeting will take place in
Bassenge, Belgium, on September 20--25, 2021.  See
https://meeting.contextgarden.net/ for more details.  The deadline for
early bird registration discount is July 1.

June 1 was also the date of the 2021 Spring release of LaTeX, which shows 
a good number of enhancements and updates. See LaTeX News #33,
https://mirror.ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/base/ltnews33.pdf
(or texdoc ltnews33 in TeX Live).

In other news, Nelson Beebe released a new bibliography with complete
coverage (1988--date) of Learned Publishing: Journal of the
Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers
(https://www.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/bib/learnpubl.bib,
https://www.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/bib/learnpubl.html).  At present
there are 2150 articles in the database.

New packages on CTAN in May
- bjfuthesis, a thesis class for Beijing Forestry University;
- bmstu-iu8, a class for writing reports at the IU8 department of IU
  faculty of BMSTU (Bauman Moscow State Technical University);
- codehigh, highlight code and demos with l3regex and lpeg;
- coffeestains, add coffee stains to documents;
- fontsetup-nonfree, a front-end to fontspec, for selected non-free fonts;
- pdfextra, extra PDF features for the OpTeX format;
- pgfmath-xfp, define pgfmath functions using xfp;
- projlib, a series of tools to simplify your workflow;
- tabularray, typeset tabulars and arrays with LaTeX3;
- tiscreen, mimic the screen of older Texas Instruments calculators.

Happy TeXing!

Boris Veytsman
TUG President