Mar21 TUG news: elections, tug'21, donations, bibnet, ctan

[TeX Users Group]

Dear TeXers,

March is upon us, which means that the deadline for nomination of TUG
officers is passed.  This year we had fewer nominations than open
positions.  According to the Bylaws the nominees are taking their
positions with the next TUG meeting.  They are: president Boris
Veytsman, and board members: Karl Berry, Johannes Braams, Kaja
Christiansen, Klaus H\"oppner, Frank Mittelbach, Ross Moore, Arthur
Rosendahl.

I want to extend my gratitude to the retiring board members:
Taco Hoekwater, Will Robertson, Herbert Vo\ss.  Thanks for your service!

Speaking of the next TUG.  The vaccination in many countries goes full
steam, and we hope to suppress the epidemics by the end of the year.
Still, there is no guarantee that international travel will be restored in
time for the conference.  Therefore the Board has made a prudent decision
to have TUG2021 online.  The dates are August 6--8.  The official
announcement and call for papers are forthcoming; in the meantime
you may contact the conference committee at tug2021 at tug.org. Submissions
and expressions of interest for presents would be most welcome.

Returning to the topic of elections.  As we announced earlier, TUG is
now an affiliate member of the Open Software Initiative,
https://opensource.org/.  In the coming elections we can compete for a
place on its Board.  Norbert Preining is nominated for an Affiliate
Seat of OSI from TUG
(https://wiki.opensource.org/bin/Main/OSI%20Board%20of%20Directors/Board%20Member%20Elections/2021%20Individual%20and%20Affiliate%20Elections/Preining2021/).
If you are an individual OSI member, you might want to consider his
candidacy.

TUG, being a non-profit, is supported by membership fees and
donations.  If you live in the US and use Amazon for your purchases, as
many people do in these times of pandemics, you may be eligible for the
Amazon Smile program, which donates 0.5% of the money you spend to a
non-profit of your choice.  If you'd like to designate TUG for your
Amazon Smile donations, you may find the link
https://smile.amazon.com/ch/22-2868942 handy.

In other news, Nelson Beebe announces the first release of a complete
bibliography of The Journal of Typographic Research, and an extensive
one of its renamed successor journal, Visible Language.  Both are in a
single file at
http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/bib/visible-language.bib and
http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/bib/visible-language.html. There are
BibTeX entries for 1093 articles in the file, and 966 (88%) of them
have abstracts.  The journals are included in the combined SQLite3
database file at
http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/bib/history-journals.db which
includes BibTeX entries for almost 251,400 articles from 135 distinct
journals in the fields of the history of mathematics, science, and
technology.

New packages on CTAN in February (https://ctan.org/pkg):
atkinson, support for the Atkinson Hyperlegible family of fonts;
eczar, a font family supporting Devanagari and Latin script;
eq-pin2corr, add PIN security to the `Correct' button of a quiz created
  by exerquiz;
hindawi-latex-template, a LaTeX template for authors of the Hindawi journals;
innerscript, modifies automatic mathematics spacing;
langsci-affiliations, collect and order authors and affiliations;
numerica, numerically evaluate mathematical expressions in LaTeX form;
pdfmanagement-testphase, LaTeX PDF management testphase bundle;
quran-bn, Bengali translations to the quran package;
twemojis, use Twitter's open source emojis through LaTeX commands.

Happy TeXing!

Boris Veytsman
TUG President