Joseph Wright – Welcome to UK-TUG http://uk-tug-archive.tug.org Promoting the use of TeX in the United Kingdom Sun, 05 Nov 2017 21:38:15 +0000 en-GB hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.6.7 6000335 Speaker Meeting 2017 http://uk-tug-archive.tug.org/2017/11/04/speaker-meeting-2017/ Sat, 04 Nov 2017 22:37:11 +0000 http://uk-tug-archive.tug.org/?p=812 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.

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UK-TUG 2016 Meeting Videos http://uk-tug-archive.tug.org/2016/10/29/uk-tug-2016-meeting-videos/ Sat, 29 Oct 2016 15:54:02 +0000 http://uk-tug-archive.tug.org/?p=798 Videos of several of the talks from the recent UK-TUG meeting are now available on Vimeo:

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Speaker Meeting 2016 http://uk-tug-archive.tug.org/2016/10/17/speaker-meeting-2016-2/ Mon, 17 Oct 2016 08:51:41 +0000 http://uk-tug-archive.tug.org/?p=792 The annual Speaker Meeting and AGM took place on Saturday at Trinity College, Oxford. We had a mix of talks and discussion as well of course the AGM. The talks were recorded and will appear shortly.

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.

 

UK-TUG 2016
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Speaker Meeting 2016 http://uk-tug-archive.tug.org/2016/08/29/speaker-meeting-2016/ Mon, 29 Aug 2016 20:20:20 +0000 http://uk-tug-archive.tug.org/?p=786 The Committee are very happy to announce that the 2016 UK-TUG Speaker
Meeting will take place on 15th October in the Fletcher Room, Trinity
College, Oxford. The day is scheduled to begin at around 10:30 and to
run until around 16:00. The UK-TUG AGM will take place as part of the
day: see the separate notice.

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.

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UK-TUG Speaker meeting videos http://uk-tug-archive.tug.org/2015/12/26/uk-tug-speaker-meeting-videos/ Sat, 26 Dec 2015 17:32:42 +0000 http://uk-tug-archive.tug.org/?p=779 For those of you not able to get the the Speaker Day held last month, our Chair has now made available a set of videos showing what went on.

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Speaker Meeting 2015 http://uk-tug-archive.tug.org/2015/11/01/speaker-meeting-2015-2/ Sun, 01 Nov 2015 09:33:33 +0000 http://uk-tug-archive.tug.org/?p=770 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 and we hope to make them available over the coming days.

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.

UK-TUG Chairs past and presentUK-TUG2015 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.)

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Notice of 2015 AGM http://uk-tug-archive.tug.org/2015/09/27/notice-of-2015-agm/ Sun, 27 Sep 2015 09:55:59 +0000 http://uk-tug-archive.tug.org/?p=765 The 2015 UK-TUG AGM will be held on Saturday 31st 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. The meeting will take place in the Sutro Room, which is in the front court at Trinity College.

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English TeX FAQ: Sources on GitHub http://uk-tug-archive.tug.org/2015/07/08/english-tex-faq-sources-on-github/ Wed, 08 Jul 2015 19:59:26 +0000 http://uk-tug-archive.tug.org/?p=758 Following the recent move of the tex.ac.uk website to a new home, work has now started on making sure we can continue to improve the FAQ (and the website). The first step of this process has been to add the current sources to GitHub within the official UK-TUG GitHub account. We will be assembling a small team of editors who will have direct access to the official master version of the FAQ, which will be used to update the live website and PDF version on CTAN. Anyone familiar with GitHub is welcome to suggest changes using a pull request (if that makes sense you are familiar with GitHub!), or  you can log an issue for the core team to look at. If you want to join the core team of editors, please contact us.

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Speaker Meeting 2015 http://uk-tug-archive.tug.org/2015/07/08/speaker-meeting-2015/ Wed, 08 Jul 2015 08:27:04 +0000 http://uk-tug-archive.tug.org/?p=752 The Committee are very happy to announce that the 2015 UK-TUG Speaker Meeting will take place on the 31st of October at Trinity College, Oxford. Attendance at the meeting is free, and a light sandwich lunch is included in the day. To help planning for the day it would be welcome if people hoping to attend could let the us know. At the same time, talk titles are very welcome: the day is usually informal but it is useful if we have a rough outline of likely talks (including length).

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tex.ac.uk server on the move http://uk-tug-archive.tug.org/2015/07/07/tex-ac-uk-server-on-the-move/ Tue, 07 Jul 2015 21:01:42 +0000 http://uk-tug-archive.tug.org/?p=750 For many years, one of the core servers for the CTAN network has been located in Cambridge and at least formally been the ‘UK node’: tex.ac.uk. Over recent years, the need for multiple core nodes on the network has diminished. At the same time, Robin Fairbairns, who ran the node at Cambridge, has retired leaving the status of the server itself (inside Cambridge University Computing Lab) somewhat up in the air.

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.

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