https://tug.org/tug2021/sched.html
TUG 2021 online -- Program
* Main Zoom link for conference (with chat). If you have issues
connecting, please contact the conference committee.
* Stream via youtube (there is an unavoidable short delay from the
live stream).
* Get together at Topia and Zulip.
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| Sue DeMeritt & Cheryl Ponchin Introduction to LaTeX
Sue and Cheryl will be giving their classic introduction to LaTeX
workshop, in English.
| Emilio Kavamura Graphics with PGFPlots - in Portuguese
The workshop intends to briefly present the features of PGFPlots for
LaTeX users. The topics covered start from the environment
description, present the graphics types and their components, and
possible customizations. The presentation ends with the use of the
animate package to provide animations from a set of in line text
graphics. The codes of the examples presented are available for you
to try and evaluate the capabilities of the graphic environment in
LaTeX.
O workshop pretende apresentar de forma breve os recursos do PGFPlots
para usuarios de LaTeX. Os topicos abordados partem da descricao do
ambiente, apresentam os tipos de graficos e seus componentes, e
algumas das customizacoes possiveis. A apresentacao e encerrada com o
uso do pacote animate que produz animacoes a partir de graficos . Os
codigos dos exemplos apresentados estao disponibilizados para que
possam experimentar e avaliar as capacidades do ambiente grafico em
LaTeX.
| Alexander Borbon Introduction to LaTeX - in Spanish
Break, 18 hours
| Simon Porter Data-driven documents using Jupyter Notebooks and
Overleaf
We will show how Digital Science combines Jupyter Notebooks and
Overleaf projects for automated creation of professionally-looking
documents, and team collaboration.
| Amelia Hugill-Fontanel Cary Graphic Arts Collection Pressroom Tour
Visit and work with a Letter Press printer.
| Paulo Ney de Souza Producing a book for Amazon KDP
Learn about the details of producing a book in LaTeX for Amazon
Kindle Direct Publishing.
Break, 2 hours
| David Crossland Variable fonts
| Matheus Rocha How to make a logo/symbol for a font
Learn how to create a new symbol and make an OpenType font for your
logo to be used in TeX and elsewhere.
| Oliver Austin Plane and Simple: Exploration of Machine Interaction
with Text Type for Visual Based Navigation Systems
Air travel provided the zoom for society before we had to 'Zoom'.
However, at the most critical stage of flight when the pilot and
plane are coming to land, readability of a runway marker is of utmost
importance. While the methods of marking have traditionally been
white paint on blacktop written in the official font used by the
International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), with the industry
turning towards the commercialization of autonomous drones, it raises
the question of whether the current font is suitable for visual-based
navigational systems. This project consequently examines the ability
of machine learning software to read, learn, and recognize digits 0-9
and letters L, C, and R across a variety of fonts.
Break, 45 minutes
| Vafa Khalighi Persian Typesetting in TeX: Past, Present, and Future
This talk is based primarily on my last 15 years of TeX development
in the area of Persian typesetting. I will look at the current state
of Persian typesetting in TeX, discuss the issues I have faced, the
current challenges, and what needs to be done. I will also discuss
how the xepersian package is used for typesetting mainly Persian
documents and show few sample documents (books, theses, and other
types of documents) produced by the xepersian package. Some
capabilities of the xepersian package will be demonstrated live.
| Norbert Preining Interview
Norbert will be interviewed by Paulo Ney de Souza.
Break, 5 hours
| Aravind Rajendran, Rishi T, Apu V, Rahul Krishnan S How a LaTeX
Based Company Lived through a modern day Pandemic?
Now we all know what a pandemic is and how dreadful it is for all
mankind. Most generations who are alive today would have not known
one, never seen one, never felt one. Surviving these trying times
have made us all adapt to change and we are no stranger. As a
typesetter for the leading Scientific, Technical and Medical
publishers around the world, we have helped typeset thousands of
pages of research articles on Covid-19. Somewhere through our
business of 'typesetting' -- directly or indirectly we feel we have
helped. Our main objective during this challenging period, was to
keep the business rolling safely, making sure our employees and
customers were not let down. Through this journey we have helped our
staff work safely ensuring they had no job loss. And for the
scientific community we have worked tirelessly, helping publishers
continue publishing research articles quickly without losing a single
committed due date. This is how we assured Business Continuity and
Certainty for our employees, customers and business. Looking back,
with gratitude we can now confidently shout out, YES, we have
achieved what we had set out for -- making LaTeX work for a business,
ensuring no job losses, standardising our workflows, making data
driven analytical decisions within LaTeX workflows and to sum it all,
keep delivering aesthetically pleasing documents to our customers and
delighting them always. It was indeed not a cake walk, times were
superbly challenging and we have persevered. Finding the Goldilocks
between aesthetics and efficiency has always been a challenge for
large production houses. But in this pandemic time we have achieved
just that the right balance "Our Goldilocks" for LaTeX based
typesetting. This is our journey, this is our story, the story still
continues...
| Martin Ruckert The WEB to cweb Conversion of TeX
This paper describes several aspects of the conversion of TeX's
source code from WEB, based on Pascal, to cweb based on CEE with
web2w. It emphasizes those aspects that are relevant for obtaining a
translation that can truly be regarded as source code and lends
itself to modifications.
| Vit Novotny Markdown 2.10.0: LaTeX Themes & Snippets, Two Flavors
of Comments, and LuaMetaTeX
Celebrating its fifth birthday, the Markdown package has received
five new features: user-defined LaTeX themes & setup snippets, two
syntax extensions for comments, and support for the LuaMetaTeX
engine. In this talk, I will introduce each of these features and
show how they can be used in practice.
| Rohit Goswami Continuous Integration and TeX with Org-Mode
In this talk I would like to introduce the usage of TeX and templates
along with generating ad-hoc class and style files for working with
orgmode. In particular, I will highlight also the process by which
literate programming practices can be implemented with babel. This
allows for a more native and flexible alternative to vendor locked in
systems like Jupyterlab which rely on JS based inelegant approaches
towards TeX typesetting. Alternative pdf generating backends
consuming TeX like Sphinx will also be covered. Finally, I would like
to go into how to leverage CI methods for TeX workflows augmented
with git.
Break, 45 minutes
| Andreas Papasalouros & Antonis Tsolomitis latex2nemeth: A direct
LaTeX-to-Braille Transcribing Tool
The Braille system allows the tactile representation of characters in
various alphabets, giving access to reading texts to visually impared
persons. The Nemeth code for Mathematics allows the representation of
Mathematics symbols and expressions into the Braille system. We have
developed a tool, named latex2nemeth, for the reliable transcription
of LaTeX documents to Nemeth Braille, thus facilitating the access of
visually impared students to studing Science. In order to support the
extensive set of Mathematics symbols covered by TeX, we have proposed
some new symbols based on the extension mechanisms of the Nemeth
code. With the aim of latex2nemeth, we have created a repository of
learning material in Braille/Nemeth code aiming to support studies in
Mathematics for visually impared students. While most of the material
available in the repository is in the Greek language, the tool
supports other languages as well. latex2nemeth is currently available
in both texlive and MiKTeX distributions.
| Ulrike Fischer On the road to tagged PDF: about StructElem, Marked
Content, PDF/A and squeezed Bars
In this talk I will present two packages as part of the LaTeX Project
"Tagged PDF":
* tagpdf which contains the core code to create a tagged PDF and is
used by the LaTeX team to test new code.
* pdfmanagement-testphase which contains a large number of
PDF-related commands and tools and installs a new management
command for central PDF dictionaries.
I will show how to use these packages, which benefits they will
bring for the "normal" user, but also speak about incompabilities
and required changes in document.
| Frank Mittelbach Taming the beast -- Advances in paragraph
tagging with pdfTeX and XeTeX
In this talk I will demonstrate and describe our solution for
automatically tagging paragraphs when using engines such as
pdfTeX or XeTeX. The situation with LuaTeX is different and
simpler and therefore not subject of this talk. I briefly touch
on the problems one encounters and explain the approacheswe used
to overcome them. This will be done with a number of
demonstrations intermixed with theoretical explanations. This
work is part of our multi-year journey to gradually modernize
LaTeX so that it can automatically produce high-quality tagged
and "accessible" PDF without the need to post-process the result
of the LaTeX run.
| Jonathan Fine Code and math in the dark
It's said: Easy reading is hard writing. Certainly both reader
and writer need to make extra effort, when the reader is visually
impaired, and the material is technical. This talk is about
improving the accessibility of TeX and its outputs. This is not a
typesetting talk. It is a user experience and social interaction
talk.
For sighted readers the printed page assists short-term memory,
as does typography. They reduce the cognitive load. The eye can
pick up subtle hints. Clarity of organisation and writing will
reduce the cognitive load for both visually impaired and sighted
readers, provided they have sufficient verbal skills.
This year I've had regular online discussions about accessibility
with blind and visually impaired persons, and listened in on
their forum conversations with each other. I've learnt a lot from
this.
The introduction of computers and networks has been, with some
exceptions, an enabling technology for the visually impaired. A
screen reader allows the user to hear what is written, without
needing a sighted assistant. And video calls by mobile phone
means that the sighted assistant need not be physically present.
Louis Braille, who became blind as a young child, developed the
tactile code for reading and writing that we now know simply as
Braille. Screen readers allow the visually impaired to write
computer software. The major screen readers are JAWS, Orca and
NVDA. It should be no surprise that their leading developers Glen
Gordon, Mark Mulcahy, Michael Curran and James Teh are all blind.
To summarize, my talk will share what I've learned from my
interactions with blind and visually impaired users, and how it
relates to the accessibility of TeX and its outputs.
Break, 1 hour
| Paulo Cereda 2020: a year in review, living on an island
In this talk, Paulo recalls 2020 at the Island of TeX: an
eventful year with a new backend for the online TeX and LaTeX
documentation lookup system, the release of a tool for finding
fonts that contain a given Unicode glyph, a major update for
arara and other actions and initiatives as a means to enrich the
TeX ecosystem. Yet, a new adventure is about to unfold, for the
Island has bold and exciting plans for the future.
| Joseph Wright Any colo(u)r you like
TeX itself has no built-in support for colour, which is therefore
handled by specials or engine-specific extensions. For LaTeX2e,
the different interfaces are abstracted out by the color package.
However, there is a lot that the color package does not do, for
example handling colour model interconversion, mixing colours or
device-specific colour spaces. Packages such as xcolor and
colorspace fill that gap, whilst the luacolor package addresses a
separate issue: avoiding the need to use whatsits for colour at
all.
As part of wider efforts to enhance the LaTeX kernel via expl3
additions, recent work on the l3color package has brought many of
these concepts into a single set of interfaces. That means not
only copying existing ideas but also ensuring maximal
functionality. In my talk, I will explore the work on l3color,
highlighting where it can go beyond the predecessor packages in
ease of use and functionality.
| samcarter News from the TikZ zoo: A short introduction to the
TikZlings package
The TikZlings package provides a selection of cute little animals
(and other beings) which can be used in TikZ. Cats, teddy bears,
penguins, snowmen and many more are included in the package.
After a short introduction on how to use the package, I will give
an overview of the available options and show some examples of
how one can customise TikZlings.
| Marcel Kruger Reviving Type 3 fonts for modern LuaLaTeX
documents
For a long time, Type 3 fonts in LaTeX generated PDF files were
known for (undesirable) bitmap fonts, but that's only a small
aspect of what this font format can do. With OpenType color fonts
the idea behind Type 3 fonts has seen a revival, and LuaTeX
recently added supported for adding such fonts for non-bitmap use
cases too.
In this talk I want to look at how this format can be used to
create smaller and simpler PDF files involving color fonts and
user generated glyphs and consider advantages and disadvantages
in contrast to traditional alternatives like virtual fonts or
macro based solutions.
| Frank Mittelbach Interview
Frank will be interviewed by Paulo Ney de Souza.
Break, 45 minutes
Annual General Meeting - not streamed on YouTube
Annual General Meeting of the TeX Users Group
| Keiran Harcombe & Boris Veytsman Creating TeXLive VPAT
statement
Governments around the world are enforcing accessibility
standards. Vendors of software used by government agencies are
required to file formal statements of accessibility for their
products. This presents a special challenge of open source
products, if they are not sponsored by a corporation.
In this talk we discuss our experience in creation of such a
formal statement for TeXLive. While command line tools are
usually more accessible than GUI interfaces, the work turned out
to be more difficult than we thought in the beginnning.
| Alexei Kolesnikov, Al Maneki, Michael Cantino, Rob Beezer
Tactile mathematics: Enabling Sighted and Blind People to Share
Mathematical Experience
High quality automated transcription of mathematical texts,
including graphics, into tactile form is an open problem. In this
talk, we describe the reasons for producing tactile forms of
mathematical texts. We will describe common challenges involved
in transcription, and progress made to date. We make the case
that semantically rich source files are needed to produce
adequate tactile and audio-tactile forms of scientific materials.
| Michael Nolan, Dr. Todd Pagano, Suhas Chikkanaravangala
Vijayakumar, Rahul Jaiswal Publishing for all: Using LaTeX to
help improve the accessibility of an open-access journal
A screen reader is a vital tool that helps individuals who are
blind or low-vision read digital text. Unfortunately, not all
file formats receive the same level of support from screen
readers. For example, while PDF files have accessibility features
that can be used, they are often not the preferred file format
for screen reader users. Between line breaks, multiple columns,
symbols, and images, screen readers often struggle with academic
journal articles in certain file formats. We will discuss the
collaboration of the Open at RIT project with an open access
journal and their combined goal of improving accessibility and
readership for all. We will explore the difficulties that
journals face on their journey towards accessibility, why this
journey is worth making, and show how using LaTeX to publish both
to our traditional PDF format as well as a more accessible HTML
format allowed us to make a big leap towards becoming a more
accessible journal.
Break, 1 hour 15 minutes
| Ross Moore & Tom Price Accessible research reports; case study,
including acronyms and glossaries
US government agencies have a need for properly Accessible PDFs.
The practice of `remediation' (adjusting and augmenting the PDF
after the typesetting phase) is both expensive and produces
generally poor results.
In this talk we show how a much better product can be created
directly using LaTeX, adapted for constructing documents that
fully conform to PDF/UA-1 and PDF/A-3a. LaTeX sources are handled
at 3 levels: (i) initial data capture by research scientists,
(ii) heavy editorial work to enable accessibility aspects, (iii)
production-level processing to produce feature-rich tagging and
full Accessibility.
The two speakers will discuss different aspects of these 3
levels, according to their own involvement in this generalised
workflow.
Of particular interest is the use of acronyms and glossaries to
enrich the PDF with features that associate technical terms and
abbreviations with a fully expanded description of the meanings
of those terms, accessible both visually and to Assistive
Technology for non-visual readers.
| Jennifer Claudio Word Search Puzzles in Arabic, Cyrillic, and
English using babel's multilingual support for LaTeX
Word search puzzles are a fun pastime and can be a helpful
learning tool for spelling and letter recognition. I present an
exploration of the babel language package for LaTeX with the
production of puzzles in Cyrillic, Arabic, and English.
| Antoine Bossard On typesetting an English-Japanese book
Improving the English skills of non-native undergraduate students
has important implications and can often be directly linked to
students' future, particularly in the IT field. The edition of a
bilingual lecture textbook is thus arguably meaningful, notably
by considering English as the "major" book language and students'
mother tongue the "minor", supporting one. Yet, from a TeXnical
point of view, this is far from being trivial. Hereinafter, LaTeX
methods are given together with guidelines to support the
realisation of a bilingual textbook. The especially technically
demanding English-Japanese scenario is considered.
| Vafa Khalighi Bidirectional Typesetting in TeX: Past, Present,
and Future
This talk is based primarily on my last 15 years of TeX
development in the area of bidirectional typesetting. I will look
at the current state of bidirectional typesetting in TeX, discuss
the issues I have faced, the current challenges, and what needs
to be done. I will also discuss how the bidi package is used for
typesetting bidirectional documents and show few sample documents
(books, theses, and other types of documents) produced by the
bidi package. Some capabilities of the bidi package will be
demonstrated live.
Break, 5 hours
| Mathias Magdowski How to Generate Personalized Tasks and Sample
Solutions for Anonymous Peer Review in Electrical Engineering
using LaTeX, PGFPlots and Circuitikz
In order to dissuade our students from bulimic learning and to
motivate them to deal with electrical engineering already during
the semester, we have developed a concept of personalized tasks
with anonymous peer review. All students receive their own
assignment by e-mail, can solve it and submit their solution as
an explanatory video via a learning management system for
correction. The video submission was chosen because not only the
result but also the process of solving the problem can be
documented much better and can be corrected or evaluated. In
order to reduce the correction effort for the teachers, the
students assess each other using a sample solution that is also
personalized. The process runs automatically and is therefore
easily scalable. Compared to simple multiple-choice or numerical
value-and-unit tasks, the calculation method and approach as well
as sketches, circuit diagrams and charts can also be evaluated
well. This contribution describes how the tasks and sample
solutions can be automatically generated in LaTeX with the help
of the packages PGFPlots and Circuitikz.
| Vic van Dijk R and LaTeX: typesetting graphs in a reproducible
way
Knitr ties LaTeX and R together in a very powerful combination.
TikZ typesets visually appealing graphs from R code. Data is
processed upon typesetting a report. All calculations can be made
available to the reader as R code. This simplifies reproducible
research. R offers a whole ecosystem of statistic procedures,
graph packages, and even connections to other systems such as
Python and MATLAB. In this talk I will show the applications of R
& LaTeX that I came across. My aim is to typeset beautiful graphs
in a widely accessible manner.
| Jonathan Fine Towards 21st century digital typography
This abstract is a short essay giving the framework for my talk.
I take a long view. In my talk I'll provide some details and
examples. My talk is about digital typography in 2050 and 2070,
and the conditions for its emergence that are already present.
A few billion years ago life in the oceans began oxygenating the
atmosphere. By 350 million years ago life on land was creating
what we now call fossil fuel (coal, crude oil and natural gas). A
few million years ago the genus homo (man) emerged.
Birds have song and dance. The tool-making Neanderthals (250,000
to 40,000 years ago) probably had language. Human art and music
arose at least 40,000 years ago. Around 14,000 years ago
agriculture and settlement started to replace nomadic hunt and
gather. Writing (on tablets) followed about 5,000 years ago.
Ancient history (3000BC to AD500) includes about 80 civilizations
worldwide with written records. This is a very rich period which
still influences contemporary thought in art, religion, society,
culture and politics.
Along with the rise of the European Renaissance in the 1400s,
printing with moveable type emerged, to replace hand copying of
books. This is typography, born out of calligraphy (writing with
pen or brush).
By the 20th century there were massive printing presses,
producing a million copies or more of each issue of a newspaper,
which were then distributed on a national basis. (In 1950 the
News of the World sold over 8 million copies each week.)
Also in the 20th century there was electrification, wireless
stations and receivers, and studios. This distributed spoken
voice news, and music, to millions. Cinema and then television
provided moving images to accompany the sound.
By 2020 vast torrents of information were being created and
transmitted using computers and networks (mobile phones, wi-fi
and 4G). Computers are everywhere, even in electric light bulbs.
The present context is very different from the 1970s, when Don
Knuth started his foundational work on digital typography, and
the creation of TeX and Metafont.
Gutenberg and others replaced hand copying of books by the
printing press. Knuth and others replaced mechanical typography
by computer (or digital) typography. Both produce only static
visual images.
If humanity avoids destroying its culture and civilization, then
the digital typography of 2050 will be different again. It is
already emerging. One major component is the (world wide) web and
its servers and browsers. This was pioneered by Tim Berners-Lee.
Another is the smart mobile phone (now dominated by Apple and
Android). A third is the large high-resolution flat screen
television. A fourth is the ubiquity of computers.
I am now in my late 60s. I hope to be alive to see the digital
typography of 2050, and if so I expect some surprises. Maxwell's
unification of electricity and magnetism (1865) lives on as the
theoretical basis for electrification, wireless and much more. I
hope the work of Knuth and others in digital typography can
similarly be transmitted as useful living tools and skills to
those who follow us.
I do not expect to be alive in 2070, yet alone the 100th birthday
of TeX (2078 to 2082). I hope my contribution adds to the cause
for celebration.
| Ondrej Sojka Towards New Czechoslovak Hyphenation Patterns
Space- and time-effective segmentation and hyphenation of natural
languages stay at the core of every document preparation system,
web browser, or mobile rendering system.
Recently, the unreasonable effectiveness of pattern generation
has been shown - it is possible to use hyphenation patterns to
solve the dictionary problem for a single language without
compromise.
In this article, we will show how we applied the marvelous
effectiveness of patgen for the generation of the new
Czechoslovak hyphenation patterns that cover two languages.
We show that the development of more universal hyphenation
patterns is feasible, allows for significant quality improvements
and space savings. We evaluate the new approach and the new
Czechoslovak hyphenation patterns.
Break, 1 hour
| Jean-Michel Hufflen Programming Bibliographies
We are interested in situations such that using the full
expressive power of a programming language is needed when
References sections are generated for a source text suitable for
LaTeX. The data model used by BibTeX is inadequate from this
point of view, the "biblatex" package is based on a more
efficient data model, but workarounds may be needed in some
circumstances.
| Nicola Talbot bib2gls: symbols
Symbols (which may be letter-like mathematical constants or
functions or may be pictographs with no intuitive ordering) can
be problematic to sort. With MakeIndex and Xindy, it's necessary
to explicitly set the sort key to the most appropriate
alphanumeric value. With bib2gls, it's better not to explicitly
set the sort field but instead use bib2gls's field fallback
system to select the most appropriate field for the given entry
type.
| Heinrich Stamerjohanns Texmlbus, a build system to convert
documents to XML and other formats
Here I present an automatic open source build system that
supports the conversion process of a collection of documents
written in LaTeX or other TeX formats. With texmlbus, the Tex to
XML BUild System, documents can not only be converted to PDF, but
also to other output formats - such as markup languages like
HTML. In particular, conversion to XML, HTML and MathML is
supported via latexml. Texmlbus can schedule jobs among several
workers (possibly on different hosts), extracts and analyzes the
the outcome of the conversion process of each document and stores
results in its own database. Result documents as well as
statistics about the results of the build process can be easily
retrieved using a web browser.
| Michal Hoftich LaTeX to HTML conversion with TeX4ht
TeX4ht is a converter from LaTeX to HTML and several other output
formats. Recent work focuses keeping current with package
updates, and supporting new packages. In this talk, I will
discuss its current status and recent development. I will show
how to how to change the look of the generated document, how to
select the right way to produce math (including MathJax and
MathML), and how to fix some common issues caused by clashes with
unsupported packages or commands.
Break, 1 hour
| Andy Black & Hugh Paterson XLingPaper's use of TeX Technologies
XLingPaper is a plugin to XMLMind, an XML editor designed for
publishers. XLingPaper does three things: 1) controls the user
interface of a powerful tool only allowing valid document
sections to be inserted into a document -- reducing user friction
in the document production process. 2) it provides a constrained
number of document sections which are relevant in the production
of linguistically oriented publications, e.g., grammars,
dissertations, thesis, journal articles, edited volumes, etc. 3)
it exports documents to a variety of formats, e.g, PDFs, ePUB,
Open Office Writer, HTML. We describe XLingPaper's development
history and its dependencies on TeX packages for PDF creation.
| Nicolas Vaughan TEI-XML to LaTeX Workflow: Issues and Lessons
In this presentation I discuss some of the issues surrounding the
workflow used in the production of the annotated Spanish
translation of the medieval work, Salomon et Marcolfus. I explain
the decisions taken regarding the XSLT transformation of the
TEI-XML document, in order to produce a final LuaLaTeX text.
| Nicolas Jimenez The Best of Both World: Bridging the Gap
Between LaTeX And Markdown
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| John Hammersley Interview
John Hammersley, co-founder and CEO of Overleaf, will be
interviewed by Paulo Ney de Souza.
Conference ends
The End.