The annual Speaker Meeting and AGM took place today at Trinity College, Oxford. We had a mix of talks and discussion as well of course the AGM. The talks were recorded: see the links below or look at the UK-TUG Vimeo page.
Morning Session
We kicked off this year with two videos from our Brazilian connection, Paulo Cereda. Paulo first talked about using code snippets in vim, making the business of writing LaTeX documents more efficient. He then moved on to look at using TeX ‘in the wild’, in particular making bingo cards using TeX.
Paulo is on the committee for TUG 2018, so we took the opportunity to talk with him about planning for next year. Paulo told us that Lua will be a key topic: many TeX users will know that Lua has it’s origins in Brazil. The organisers of TUG 2018 also want to ensure that tutorials and other student-friendly aspects are central.
The morning continued with Joseph Wright speaking about two LaTeX3-related topics. First, Joseph talked about recent work by the LaTeX team on making regexes available in expl3. These offer a powerful approach to pattern matching, and should give cleaner code (at least when used correctly!). He then looked briefly at ongoing work to port existing LaTeX2e graphics support to expl3, and how there are still a few unresolved areas to consider.
The final talk of the morning came from Jonathan Fine. Jonathan looked at what useful information a keen student would find if told to ‘use LaTeX for your maths work’. This led him to some expected and some less expected websites!
Afternoon session
We decamped for food to a local restaurant, where conversation ranged over TeX topics and well beyond. Returning to the venue, the formal business of the day was completed: members will receive a separate communication concerning the AGM.
Our final talk came from David Carlisle of the LaTeX team. David talked about how the team are seeking to update aspects of the kernel to work with user expectations, largely about filenames: dots, spaces and UTF-8 support. David also highlighted an updated math mode guide coming from the AMS.
