Jul22 TUG news: summer, conferences, latex2nemeth, latex, ctan

[TeX Users Group]

Dear TeXers,

Another month of epidemics, political turmoil, wars and looming hunger.
It is difficult to imagine this, looking at the serene San Francisco Bay
with its calm waters during a beautiful summer sunset. This brings to
mind the lines by Sara Teasdale, chosen by Ray Bradbury for his short
story. The poem was written in 1918 when another pandemic and war
ravaged the world,

     There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
     And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;

     And frogs in the pools singing at night,
     And wild plum-trees in tremulous white;

     Robins will wear their feathery fire
     Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;

     And not one will know of the war, not one
     Will care at last when it is done.

     Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree
     If mankind perished utterly;

     And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
     Would scarcely know that we were gone.

July is the month of celebration for my American readers. This day the
Independence Declaration was passed in 1776. I congratulate them with
this great date, and would like to remind them of the episode from the
journal of James McHenry, a delegate of the Constitution Convention. The
episode occurred at another important day in American history, September 18,
1787, when the Convention adjourned. ``A lady asked Dr. Franklin,
Well Doctor what have we got, a republic or a monarchy ... A republic,
replied the Doctor, if you can keep it.'' The lady in question was
Elizabeth Willing Powel; interestingly enough, her name was omitted in
many retellings of this story in the last centuries. One of the signs of
the changing times is that we no longer put up with the anonymity of
women in our history.

July is also the month of our main conference, TUG 2022,
https://tug.org/tug2022/ (July 22-24). The program is exciting and
covers many interesting topics from Accessibility to XeTeX (I did not
find presentations covering the two last letters of the alphabet, unless
a last minute submission arrives). If you did not register yet for the
conference, please do so. We also need volunteers to moderate sessions
and to manage break rooms and social events. If you want to help, please
contact the conference committee (email tug2022 at tug.org). I also would
like to express gratitude to our conference sponsors: DANTE e.V.,
Google, Overleaf, speedata, STM Document Engineering Pvt Ltd, University
of Adelaide (Australia).

The conference will also feature our Annual General Meeting.

Among other important upcoming meetings are:
- the 16th ConTeXt Meeting: Dreifelden, Germany, Sept. 12-18, 2022.
https://meeting.contextgarden.net/2022/
- BachoTeX 2022: Bachotek, Poland, Sept. 21-25, 2022.
https://www.gust.org.pl/bachotex/2022-en

In other news, I am glad to report that Andreas Papasalouros and Antonis
Tsolomitis have reported the successful implementation of the
latex2nemeth translator from LaTeX to Braille+Nemeth math, including
support of almost all of amsmath. The project was supported by Aegean
University and the TUG development fund. See
https://myria.math.aegean.gr/labs/dt/braille/index-en.html and
https://ctan.org/pkg/latex2nemeth. The TUG development fund is
continuously accepting applications. Everybody is welcome to apply:
https://tug.org/tc/devfund/

The new release of the LaTeX kernel, covered in
https://www.latex-project.org/news/latex2e-news/ltnews35.pdf, has many
interesting features, including a new way to define metadata, the new
latex-lab bundle (https://ctan.org/pkg/latex-lab and latex-lab-dev) for
experimentation with the metadata and tagging, a new mark mechanism,
key/value options treatment, and many other improvements.

In May I had a sad duty to report the death of our longstanding
colleague Dave Walden.  Recently the IEEE published a new issue of
the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, which includes his
(probably) last paper as (co-)author, "Seeking High IMP Reliability in
Maintenance of the 1970s ARPAnet": https://doi.org/10.1109/mahc.2022.3171970

New packages on CTAN in June:

- asternote, annotation symbols enclosed in square brackets and marked
  with an asterisk;
- cprotectinside, use cprotect arbitrarily nested;
- csassignments, a wrapper for article with macros and customizations
  specifically for computer science assignments;
- dvisirule, superimpose the covered hline and vline in a LaTeX
  tabular/colortbl environment;
- familytree, draw family trees;
- hideanswer, generate documents with and without answers by toggling a switch;
- inlinelabel, assign equation numbers to inline equations;
- jpneduenumerate, enumerative expressions in Japanese education;
- jpnedumathsymbols, mathematical equation representation in Japanese
  education;
- latex-lab, LaTeX laboratory: Development pre-release;
- ligtype, suppress inappropriate ligatures;
- lt3luabridge, execute Lua code in any TeX engine that exposes the shell;
- magicwatermark, an easy and flexible way to set watermarks;
- multifootnote, multiple numbers for the same footnote;
- multiple-choice, LaTeX package for multiple-choice questions;
- showhyphenation, show hyphenation points;
- showkerning, showing kerns in a document;
- simples-matrices, define matrices by given list of values;
- spacekern, kerning between words and against space.

Happy TeXing!

Boris Veytsman
TUG President