Speaker Meeting 2014

The annual Speaker Meeting and AGM took place on Saturday at Trinity College, Oxford. We had a mix of talks as well 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: the turnout was somewhat ‘select’ but we still had a good atmosphere.

Paulo Cereda opened the formal business with a talk via Skype from Brazil. Paulo gave us an update on his build tool arara, bring the story up to date since his presentation in 2012. The talk concentrated on new features in arara 4.0, and why it’s required a re-write to be in a position to make this available. Paulo described the challenges of adding new ideas to his tool and why it had been a longer job than he’d expected.

Simon Dales, UK-TUG Chair, then took up the floor to tell us about his work using the Doxygen tool for creating documentation for TeX code. Simon showed us the advantages of his approach as well as where he’s had to compromise to get a tool for C code to understand the very different nature of TeX!

Joseph Wright gave the first of his two talks for the day looking again at a build tool: l3build. This tool is focussed on the needs of package developers, and Joseph showed us how the LaTeX Project have made both testing and releasing code easier using the new code.

Afternoon session

After the sandwiches, Joseph gave his second talk, this time looking at how case changing can be implemented in TeX and follow the rules laid down by the Unicode Consortium . He outlined why TeX primitives can’t do everything that’s needed before showing an approach recently added to expl3 (although he kept away from the code!). This talk finished just in time for the formal business of the day: the AGM.

After lunch and the AGM we moved on to the last talk of the day from David Carlisle. He showed us the tension between ‘stability’ for LaTeX2e and the need to fix bugs and work with new engines. David explained what areas the LaTeX Project have been considering addressing, and what problems that work might solve (and cause!).

The day finished with a photo of the delegates in the late autumn sunshine!

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