May22 TUG news: war, David Walden, TUG'22, TUGboat, TeX Live, CTAN

[TeX Users Group]

Dear TeXers,

It is sad for me to open yet another letter with the news about the war
in Europe. As I write this, the estimate for the number of Ukrainian
refugees who fled their country is at 5.5 million, with another 7.7
million of internally displaced people. 90% of these 5.5 million are
women and children. Some organizations, like the Canadian parliament,
call the acts of Russia a genocide, and even more organizations
recognize them as war crimes. The danger of the use of weapons of mass
destruction is very high. Many scientific and technology societies do
what they can to help. For example, the American Physical Society held a
plenary session at their Annual Meeting to explore the history and
background of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and created a support
community
(https://info.aps.org/e/640833/d0-5964-4653-a7a6-491cd4fa3969/n3blw/658309016).
Our society is much smaller, but we also try to help. Recently the Board
approved free membership for people in war zones and refugees, with full
confidentiality. We are thinking about other ways to help.

In other unhappy news, I am very sad to report the passing of a great
friend and TeX enthusiast, Dave Walden.  Dave was a living history of
computers and computer typesetting, who knew everything and everybody.
He was one of the most generous people I ever knew, always here to
help and support.  He was a TUG director and treasurer for many years.
I learned a lot from Dave and his advice.  He will be missed.  (A longer
memoriam will appear in the next TUGboat.)

TUG 2022 and the TUG Annual Meeting are getting closer. If you have not
registered yet, please do so at https://tug.org/tug2022/register.html.
And please send presentation proposals to tug2022 at tug.org.

Let me remind you of the important dates:
June 15 - deadline for abstracts for presentation proposals.
July 10 - deadline for preprints to be in the program.
July 22-24 - conference, including the TUG Annual General Meeting.
July 31 - deadline for final papers for the printed TUGboat proceedings.

This year both the conference and AGM are online, and participation is
free (as always, we will be grateful for any donation).

TUGboat 43:1 has been printed and will start hitting mailboxes soon. The
next issue will be the TUG'22 proceedings. We also welcome submissions
for the next regular issue (in the fall). See https://tug.org/TUGboat

TeX Live 2022 is being downloaded and actively used.  See
https://tug.org/texlive/doc/texlive-en/texlive-en.html#news
for the most significant changes.

New CTAN (https://ctan.org) packages in April:
- circledtext, create circled text;
- commonunicode, convert common unicode symbols to LaTeX code;
- expex-acro, wrapper for the expex package;
- hsindex, an alternative index processor to imakeidx written with Haskell;
- hvextern, writing and reading of external source code and insert the output;
- knuth-hint, C/WEB sources from TeX Live in HINT format;
- luamathalign, more flexible alignment in amsmath environments;
- postnotes, endnotes for LaTeX;
- proflabo, draw laboratory equipment;
- simplenodes, simple nodes in four colors written in TikZ for LaTeX;
- unisc, Unicode small caps with Lua/XeLaTeX;
- xduts, Xidian University TeX Suite.

Happy TeXing!

Boris Veytsman
TUG President