The annual Speaker Meeting and AGM took place today at Trinity College, Oxford. We had a mix of talks, discussion and of course the AGM. The talks were recorded: they’ll be available soon (after editing), and we’ll post again once that happens.
Morning Session
The day began with informal discussions over coffee: there were some ‘old hands’ and a few new faces, and it was nice to get a chance to chat with other TeX users. The turnout was good, but like last year we had just enough room for everyone!
Simon Dales, UK-TUG Chair, gave us the first talk of the day. He spoke about using Lua within TeX as a general scripting/programming language, running his live demos on a Rasberry Pi (those people at last year’s meeting will remember the set up!).
We then moved on to Dick Nickalls talking about typesetting Rubik’s cubes in LaTeX. Dick told us a lot about Rubik’s cubes: they seem to be big in particle physics! There was a lot in the talk, bnot just the TeX (TikZ-based), but also mathematical notation, speed records and quarks. An entertaining mix.
Back with LuaTeX, Arthur Reutenauer showed us how to load TrueType fonts using Lua: another live demo. Arthur kept things simple, using the plain format to run his examples. There was lots of information about fonts to keep up with.
The morning session ended with Phil Molyneux giving us a meta-talk: a talk about giving talks to train new LateX users! Phil will be giving a variant of the UK-TUG information at a publisher in London next week, and he gave us an insight into the difference between the needs of authors and editors as ‘new’ LaTeX users.
Afternoon session
After lunch and the formal AGM (details already on there way to members), we moved on to the last talk of the day from Joseph Wright. He gave us an insight into looking after other people’s code, telling us about his work on beamer and biblatex.
We then moved to a workshop on ‘new’ TeX developments. There were a range of topics covered, such as direct PDF output, SyncTeX and editors. The discussion was lively, and everyone seemed to enjoy it!