This year, the committee experimented with recording the Speaker Meeting talks, which are now available on our Vimeo channel. The recordings this year contain audio and slides. The experiment looks pretty successful, so next year we may try to capture the ‘live demo’ screens too!
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The annual Speaker Meeting and AGM took place yesterday. We had a mix of talks, discussion and of course the AGM. The talks were recorded: we hope to make these available soon.
Morning Session
The day began with informal discussions over coffee: there are relatively few opportunities to meet up with other TeX users, so this is an important part of the day. Turnout this year was good, and the committee were pleased that this meant the venue was full, but not so full as to mean people were turned away!
The first talk of the day came from David Carlisle, member of the LaTeX3 Project and author of the longtable package. David explained the history of the package, and how the design reflects the constraints of computers in the late 1980s. He talked about the issues this means when interacting with other packages, an in particular the challenges of bidirection and colour work with tables.
Simon Dales gave the second talk, looking at his experiences with TeX on the Raspberry Pi and using LuaTeX (on the Pi) for programming. Simon gave his talk using a live demo: there were a lot of cables on the meeting table!
The third talk of the day was an exciting event all-round, as it came live from Brazil using Skype. Paulo Cereda told us about his new TeX automation tool, arara, and how it contrasts with existing approaches such as latexmk and Rubber. Paulo has been working very hard with UK-TUG member Brent Longborough on the latest release of arara, and it was very exciting to hear about this international effort.
Afternoon session
After Paulo’s talk, lunch arrived and informal discussion got under-way again, accompanied by sandwiches.
The first talk of the afternoon was from Joseph Wright, who talked about the ‘coffins’ concept that the LaTeX3 Project have developed. Joseph focussed on the user interface layer of the work, rather than the code. This sparked a lively discussion on future directions for TeX-related development in general.
The AGM took place a 2 pm: the formal business is reported in draft minutes to members.
After the AGM, we had a second Raspberry Pi demo, this time from Jonathan Fine. Jonathan highlighted the computing power available in the Pi, and contrasted it with a PC he built from components around 10 years ago. The opportunity to develop ‘typesetting devices’ based on the Pi was a key part of the talk.
Joseph then returned to present slides from the TeX Gyre Math Project: these were given at the EuroTeX meeting last week. Joseph gave his own thoughts on the slides, and several other members also contributed to a lively discussion.
The last session of the day was taken up with discussion on some of the topics which had come up during the day. One key possibility that was raised was running a TeX graphics course, something the committee agreed to look at.
The 2012 UK-TUG AGM will be held on Saturday 20th October at 14:00. The meeting will take place as part of the UK-TUG Speaker meeting at Trinity College, Oxford, OX1 3BH. We hope that as members as possible will be able to attend the AGM and the Speaker meeting.
Election for Chair
The two-year term of office of the Chair, Alan Moon, finishes at the end of the AGM. Anyone who wishes to stand should ask a member to nominate them for the post: in case of difficulty, please approach the committee. Nominations should be sent to the Secretary by 23:59 on the 5th of October. The candidate should also confirm that they are happy to stand, and may be send a statement for circulation to members in support of their candidature.
If there is a contested election then there will be an electronic ballot. Details of the candidates and supporting statements will be circulated on Sunday 7th October and voting will close at 23:59 on Thursday 18th October.
Elections for the committee
The term of all committee members expires at the end of the AGM (with the exception of the Chair, as detailed above). Anyone who wishes to stand should contact the Secretary at any time before the AGM. Most of the business of the committee is carried out electronically, so a remote location should be no barrier. The mechanism for nominations is similar to that for Chair, with a nomination from a member along with confirmation from the candidate, although there is no need to submit any kind of statement.
Motions for the AGM
Any member may submit a motion to the AGM. Motions should be sent to the Secretary at the e-mail address above, and should be received by 23:59 on Friday 5th October. Motions and supporting documentation will be circulated on Sunday 7th October. Voting on motions will be possible by proxy for members not able to attend the AGM. Full details will be given with the motions when circulated.
The annual UK-TUG speaker meeting will take place on Saturday 20th October in central Oxford. Attendance will as usual be free for UK-TUG members and a sandwich lunch will be available. The event typically runs from around 10 am to 5 pm: the full schedule is still being arranged.
The committee hopes to have a varied programme of talks and discussion on the day. We are therefore looking for speakers for talks of any length. The day will be very informal, and there is always a flexible schedule, so new speakers should not feel intimidated.
At the same time, it is very useful for us to have some idea of numbers, so we can plan the catering and venue capacity. It would therefore be very welcome if members would let the committee know if they are
planning to attend.
The annual UK-TUG Speaker Meeting and AGM took place yesterday at Trinity College, Oxford. The audience was small, but discussion was very lively.
Morning session
Joseph Wright began the day’s discussions with a report on the LaTeX training events run by UK-TUG in the last two years. He explained how the materials have been developed, leading to the source being available on GitHub. Joseph explained that the training is delivered with short sessions at the screen with a lot of opportunity for students to work on examples. Jonathan Fine suggested that videoing parts of course would be an opportunity to make the training more widely available. For this, an on-line LaTeX system would be needed. Joseph pointed to ScribTeX as an existing example. Jonathan also wondered about using the slide source to generate an HTML version of the material. Joseph said he’d look at this.
Simon Dales spoke next about documenting TeX sources. He described using Doxygen, a C tool, to take source comments and turn these into documentation in a variety of formats. He explained that this approach can avoid the need to decided in advance how to document code, but that Doxygen is too linked to C-style syntax to be the ideal tool for TeX. He showed a proof of concept demonstration using Doxygen, then described his second-generation approach to the problem, which he is currently implementing in Lua.
After lunch
Jonathan Fine gave the first talk in afternoon, looking at the opportunities presented by iPad and similar mobile devices. He first explained the Knuth was motivated to write TeX because of the limitations of photolithography in reproducing his books. Jonathan explained that the ePub format, used by most devices except the Kindle, is a compressed HTML5-based set of files. HTML5 features SVG as a key component, and Jonathan described how this allows typography in the webpage. Jonathan described how conversion from DVI to SVG can be used to get TeX quality output into ePub output. There was then a lively discussion about the challenges of mobile device typography.
AGM
The formal business of the day followed at 2 pm. A draft of full minutes for the AGM has already been circulated to members. The make up of the new committee was also announced:
- Simon Dales
- Jonathan Fine
- Alun Moon
- John Peters
- Joseph Wright
The new committee will be making some more announcements in due course about other matters arising.
Afternoon session
After the AGM, Simon Dales talked about using LuaTeX for programming. He showed a simple Hello World document using Lua to include the text in a LaTeX file, then described the ability to load Lua modules. He showed how you can create your own modules to be loaded by Lua. As a fuller demonstration of the use of Lua, he showed how it allows processing of structured data to produce complex table.
Joseph Wright then talked about the TeX.sx site, and what advantages it has for new users over more traditional threaded lists and forums. He described the various features of the site, such as the Q&A structure, voting, reputation and the ability to edit material. Jonathan Fine is also registered on TeX.sx, and added a number of useful comments.
The day ended with a short stroll around Trinity College, which in the autumn sunshine was very pleasant indeed.
The committee are making initial arrangements for our yearly speaker meeting and AGM. This initial notice is very much to allow for forward planning. This year’s meeting will be taking place on the 22nd of October at Trinity College in Oxford. The arrangements for the day have yet to be finalised, but based on previous years we would expect the formal AGM business to take place early in the afternoon, with talks and TeX-related discussion surrounding that. Suggestions for talk titles, topics for discussion and so on are very welcome.
The UK TeX Users’ Group (UK-TUG) periodically runs training courses in using LaTeX. We are very pleased to announce a presentation of our beginners course, loosely entitled ‘Using LaTeX to write a thesis’. The course will cover topics such as:
- Setting up LaTeX on a computer
- Creating basic documents
- Logic structure in LaTeX documents
- Including graphical material
- Bibliographies
- LaTeX Q&A
The course will be taking place on Friday April 15th in central Cambridge, and will run from approximately 10 a.m. to around 4:30 pm. The course will be aimed at new LaTeX users, with an emphasis on hands-on experience. We will be using a computer lab equipped with Windows PCs, but there will the opportunity to set up your system to use LaTeX. More details about the full programme for the day will be circulated to participants nearer to the course date.
Places are strictly limited by the size of the venue. To book a provisional place, please e-mail joseph.wright@morningstar2.co.uk with your details. The non-refundable course fee (£10) and the a copy of the membership form should then be sent to Joseph Wright, UK-TUG Secretary. (The course fee includes membership of UK-TUG for 2011.) Payment should be sent within two weeks of making a provisional booking, otherwise the space may be released. We will also hold a ‘reserve’ list of names if the course reaches capacity: experience suggests that the course will book up very rapidly.
The course material is intended as a general introduction to using LaTeX. However, it is useful to have some idea about the interests of those attending, as this enables us to prepare for at least some of the potential questions. A brief outline of your background is therefore encouraged along with your booking. It is also useful to know what operating system you usually use, as this is useful when preparing instructions on how to set up LaTeX for your own systems.
The annual UK-TUG meeting, including talks on a range of topics and the AGM, took place today at the wider FLOSS meeting in Birmingham. As this was an ‘uncoference’, the day was organised very much as it happened, although the AGM was of course a fixed item!
Opening
The day started with a talk to everyone at the uncoference from Simon Phipps, a member of the Open Source Initiative board. The talk ranged over a wide range of topics, and was very much looking at the big picture for developers in Free and Open Source software. This sparked a lot of discussion, which went on well into the coffee break!
Morning session
After the coffee break, the unconference split into different groups, and those of us with an interest in TeX and related issues got together. The flexible nature of the uncoference meant that along with a core group of the TeX-devoted, there were interested audience members picking up on individual talks.
Jonathan Fine, outgoing Chairman of UK-TUG, took the first talk of the day looking at MathJax, SVG and the web. The focus was on the way that high-quality typography can be presented in modern web browsers. The SVG format was a key part of his talk, and Jonathan demonstrated how TeX output can be converted into scalable, copyable content using dvisvgm. He then explained the issues with Internet Explorer 7 and 8 with this approach: lack of SVG support! The solution to this is the Google-produced SVGweb, which converts the SVG to Flash content. Of course, Jonathan then explained that this is not an ideal solution, but it’s better than no support at all.
Jonathan’s talk led into a wider discussion about the availability of web fonts. Once again, Google’s name was mentioned, and their work on a web font directory. It was very pleasing to see David Crossland, our former Secretary, as the author of several of these.
The second talk of the morning session was given by Alex Regueiro on the topic of running TeX as a service on Windows. Alex started off outline the background: the cost of starting up a process on Windows, and the need to look beyond MiKTeX and TeX Live for a solution. He then described the approaches he’s tried, first sticking with a standard TeX binary and then looking at a more complete approach in which a change file is applied to the TeX sources to avoid file operations.
AGM
After lunch, the formal business of the day needed to be completed. A draft of full minutes for the AGM have already been circulated to members. The AGM marked the end of Jonathan Fine’s tenure as Chairman: he handed over to new Chairman Alun Moon at the end of the AGM. The make up of the new committee was also announced:
- Simon Dales
- Jonathan Fine
- Alun Moon
- David Saunders
- John Peters
- Jonathan Webley
- Joseph Wright
The new committee will be making some more announcements in due course about other matters arising.
Afternoon session
At the end of the formal business of the AGM, Alun Moon gave a statement as the new Chairman of UK-TUG. This led on to a wider discussion on the topics he raised, which broadly covered four key topics: advocacy, awareness, usability and training. There was a lot of engagement in all of these areas from the members (and non-members) present.
Joseph Wright gave the first talk of the afternoon on his LaTeX package siunitx. Joseph focussed on how he’s tried to help users, with the detail of the development process very much in the background. siunitx is a package for dealing with typesetting numbers and units, and Joseph highlighted the fact that there are a wide range of user requirements that he has tried to handle using key-value settings rather than a large number of user macros.
The second talk came from Andrew Ford, who focussed on converting a LaTeX book to ePub format, using the example of his wife’s cookbook of vegetarian recipes. Andrew explained that the ePub format is a combination of XHTML and CSS, and that LaTeXML has allowed a relatively painless conversion process. Looking beyond ePub, conversion to Kindle format (which unlike ePub is closed).
Next, Simon Dales talked about his work on using Doxygen as a tool for documenting TeX material. The concept he described makes use of suitably-designed comments to provide the documentation, a concept that many LaTeX programmers will have seen with DocStrip and the DTX format. However, Doxygen makes HTML/LaTeX/… documentation directly from the final TeX/LaTeX package files, so is good at retrospectively documenting code. Simon highlighted some of the compromises he’s had to make to get Doxygen (a tool for C-like languages) to work with TeX. His system is more than a proof of concept and promoted quite a range of discussion on the broader documentation issue.
Squeezed in before the end of the day, Joseph Wright came back to say five minutes about the TeX StackExchange site, something that both he and Jonathan Fine have taken quite an interest in.
This year the AGM meeting will be a bit different. It will be part of the FLOSS Unconference, which takes place in Birmingham on Saturday 16th October. You don’t need to book, just to turn up is enough. The Uncoference starts at 9.30.
At the start of the day everyone gets up in turn and says who they are, what their interests are, and what they’d like to do. Based on this we get topics and then a schedule for the day.
We’ll be sharing the unconference with local Linux user groups, Birmingham Permongers, PyCon UK (Python) and the West Midlands Ruby User Group. (FLOSS stands for free/libre/open source software.)
So if you’re interested, please visit our wiki page on the FLOSS site and tell us who you and and what you’d like to do. If you’ve got a talk to give the Committee can probably help with travel expenses, so just ask.
The 2010 UK-TUG AGM will be held on Saturday 16th October, at 2pm. The meeting will be held as part of the FLOSS Unconference at the Birmingham and Midland Institute, Margaret Street, Birmingham, B3 3BS, within easy walking distance of New Street and Snow Hill stations. We hope that as members as possible will be able to attend the AGM, and also perhaps attend other sessions at the Unconference, or even visit the nearby exhibition of the spectacular Anglo-Saxon Staffordshire hoard of gold and silver jewellery.
Election for Chair
The two-year term of office of the Chair comes to an end at the AGM, and Jonathan Fine has indicated that he does not wish to stand again. Anyone who wishes to stand should ask a member to nominate them for the post (in case of difficulty, ask any current member of the Committee apart from the Returning Officer).
Email nominations should be sent to the Returning Officer at treasurer@uk.tug.org, from the email address registered in the UK-TUG database; the candidate should also send an email agreeing to be nominated, again from the email address in our database. The closing date for nominations is Monday 26th September. Candidates are asked to include a statement (at most 1,000 words) and, if they wish, their email address and URL. Statements received will be published on the UK TUG website, on pages with commenting disabled. Nominations can also be made by post: UK-TUG members should have received details of this process.
If there is a contested election then there will be a postal ballot. Ballot papers will be sent out on Monday 4th October, and should be returned to the Returning Officer by midnight on Thursday 14th October.
Elections for the committee
We have at present five elected committee members (plus the Chair ex-officio), and at least one has indicated that he will not stand for re-election. It would be good to have some new Committee members; most of our business is conducted electronically, so a remote location would be no barrier. Anyone who wishes to stand should contact the Secretary, Joseph Wright, any time before the AGM. The mechanism for nominations is similar to that for chair (by email to secretary@uk.tug.org, with a member making the nomination and confirmation from the candidate) although there is no need to submit any kind of statement. Again, members will have had details of how to nominate by post.
Motions for the AGM
Any member may submit a motion to the AGM. Motions should be sent to the Secretary either by post or by email, at the address above, and should be received by midnight on Friday 1st October.
Accounts, Treasurer’s Report and Secretary’s Report for 2009-10
The uninspected accounts are available for reading now; the formal inspected accounts will be available at the AGM.The Treasurer’s and Secretary’s reports are also available now.
Speaker Meeting
The AGM will form part of a Speaker Meeting: full details on this will follow shortly.