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.

• xparse revisited, Joseph Wright
• A case for templates and code snippets, Paulo Cereda
• TeX in industry, Stefan Kottwitz
• Workshop: TeX in education

Morning Session

The day began as usual with some informal talk over coffee, giving everyone a chance to catch up or in several cases meet for the first time. We had a good turnout so there was a lot of lively discussion all day.

Joseph Wright kicked off the formal session by revisiting an area he’s looked at before: xparse. This offers a way to define LaTeX syntax well beyond \newcommand, and is one of the most popular ‘products’ of the LaTeX3 project. Joseph showed the good and (perhaps) less good in xparse, with the overall picture being strongly positive. This led to interesting discussions focussed on who the xparse syntax allows an abstract description of LaTeX syntax: a real benefit for using ‘TeX beyond TeX’.

Stefan Kottwitz, visiting from Lufthansa Industry Solutions, showed us how TeX and in particular TikZ can be used well beyond the normal academic focus of TeX. Stefan is using TikZ as a key part of his work documenting network systems in the cruise industry, and showed us how he can make use of the programming abilities it offers to produce accurate and readable documentation with ease. The talk was followed by lively and very impressed discussion on how TikZ is a real showcase for TeX more generally.

The final talk before lunch came by video link from Paulo Cereda in Brazil. Paulo talked this year about what might be regarded as an abstract concept: what is a template. He showed how there can be good and bad templates, and the fact that what users see and what programmers intend can be very different.

Afternoon session

Lunch took us away from the meeting venue, and gave us all a chance to stretch our legs and explore a number of interesting topics (mostly TeX-related!). Back at the venue, we moved on to the AGM: details of the formal business have been sent separately to members.

The afternoon session started with a look back at the life of Sebastian Rahtz. Sebastian was a founder member of UK-TUG and perhaps the key driver in making TeX available outside of the mainframe computing sphere. David Carlisle shared with us some slides made by Phil Taylor and originally presented at the recent memorial to Sebastian.

Our Chair, Kaveh Bazargan, then spoke to us about a topic he first illustrated last year: creating interfaces for TeX that allow non-experts to exploit the power available. Kaveh focussed this year on using TikZ as a method to prepare graphics in journal production, and showed us a very impressive interface which avoids any code but also avoids the ‘mouse hell’ of a GUI.

We then moved on to a workshop on TeX in education. This was a lively session which will be written up in more detail in a future post. There was certainly a good degree of eagerness to use UK-TUG’s resources to promote TeX more widely, a theme indeed of the entire day.

Talks on TeX-related are invited: talk times are flexible.

The committee has invited a special guest: Stefan Kottwitz of Lufthansa Industry Solutions. He will talk about applications of TeX in industry, such as using TeX for programming Cisco switches and generating converged network designs.

Attendance at the meeting is free for members of UK-TUG. The committee
will provide lunch as part of the day: please let us know if you will be
attending to plan for this.

Morning Session

The day began as usual with some informal talk over coffee, giving everyone a chance to catch up or in several cases meet for the first time. We had a good turnout so there was a lot of lively discussion all day.

The morning talks focussed on TeX running remotely on web servers.  Joseph Wright started us off looking at the work the LaTeX3 team have been doing recently to automate testing of the expl3 programming environment using a web service called Travis-CI. Joseph looked at the approaches available to automating installation of TeX on a remote machine, how it integrates with testing and how this allows the test system to be extended without impacting on day-to-day work of the team.

Jonathan Fine spoke next about the Chromebook challenge: offering TeX to systems with no ability to install software. Jonathan focussed in particular on creating local servers (dedicated hardware) which avoid the need to be ‘always connected’.

The third talk of the morning came from Kaveh Barzagan, current UK-TUG Chair. Kaveh outlined work done by his company in creating a (potentially) end-to-end publishing system using XML as the data storage format via a web interface. This system uses TeX for the typeset output but also offers a range of other formats depending on user requirements. Kaveh showed a range of impressive features and this threw up a lot of interesting ideas.

Afternoon session

There was lively discussion over the lunch break is various small groups which took us nicely to the formal business of the day: the AGM. Details of the AGM will be sent to members separately.

The afternoon session was focussed more on using TeX locally as an end user. David Carlisle gave us the first talk, detailing how the LaTeX team have been addressing the ‘new’ TeX engines in the kernel. In particular, David focussed on the requirements LuaTeX has in terms of low-level support and what the team have done to address those.

Kaveh gave us a second talk looking at how he’s creating a GUI for adjusting the design of LaTeX documents.  Kaveh showed how by extracting the parameters from package into a defined format he can provide (nearly) instant feedback on how adjusting these settings alters the look of documents without the user needing to understand the underlying TeX code.

The day finished with a photo of all of the (current and former) UK-TUG Chairs present and (almost) all of the delegates.

(Left-to-right: Jonathan Fine, Peter Kirby, Eddie Mizzi, Jay Hammond, Kaveh Barzagan, Joseph Wright, David Carlisle, Simon Dales, Brent Longborough, Chris Rowley. Missing from picture: Phil Molyneux. Picture Credit: Brent Longborough.)

As well as the CTAN node, tex.ac.uk has hosted the English TeX FAQ for many years, again at least formally the ‘UK-TUG FAQ’. Those questions and answers are extremely useful and more importantly linked to by a lot of people.

We’ve now made arrangements to move tex.ac.uk to a new machine and moved the FAQ across, keeping (hopefully) all of the links working. At the same time the CTAN node has been retired: DANTE are happy to run a single core node and co-ordinate the work needed for that system. UK-TUG thank Robin for his efforts over many years on CTAN and the FAQ, DANTE for taking on the key role in supporting CTAN, and our hosting partner for the new tex.ac.uk server, Stefan Kottwitz. UK-TUG will be co-ordinating work to continue maintaining and improving the FAQ and we expect to announce more details in the near future.