Arrival
The TUG2015 meeting proper started today, but people started meeting up yesterday. I arrived quite late (and indeed later than I’d expected), but a ‘welcome committee’ of TeX-sx regulars were outside the hotel when I got here! It was nice to finally be able to put some faces to the names.
Morning one
For those of us staying at the conference hotel, there was a chance to meet up with other people over breakfast. We then congregated in the meeting room, which filled up nicely as we got up to the business end: the start of the meeting proper.
The organisers have split the talks into broad topics, which makes summarising things a bit easier!
Session one: PDF Output
After a (very) short opening by outgoing TUG President, Steve Peter (in excellent German), we moved on to three talks broadly focussed on aspects of PDF production, and in particular creating ‘rich’ PDFs. Ross Moore started us off by looking at how he’s been tackling making semantic information available in the PDF output from maths. He’s tackling that using dedicated comments (read by his package) and PDF ‘tool tip’ comments. We then heard from Olaf Drümmer from the PDF Association about accessible PDFs: PDF/UA. These developments again keep semantic information in the PDF itself, so it can be parsed by for example screen readers. Ross then returned in a two-hand talk with Peter Selinger to explain work on updating pdfx to generate PDF/A files from pdfTeX and LuaTeX. They told us about the technical challenges and the improvements users will see in there use of the package.
Session two: Unicode
Session two focussed on the challenges with using Unicode-compliant engines, XeTeX and LuaTeX. I started off, talking about how we can get data from Unicode into the engines for text processing. I focussed on two area, setting up things like \catcode and doing case changing. (I’ll probably post the slides an a summary.) Will Robertson then talked about deal with maths in Unicode, and in particular the challenges of matching up the way Unicode describe maths characters with the way (La)TeX describes them. He looked at some of the decisions he made in the unicode-math and how he’s revisiting them. That ran nicely into the final talk of the morning: the GUST TeX team’s first talk from Piotr Strzelczyk on Unicode maths fonts. He focussed on the detailed challenges the team have faces.
Session three: Futures
After lunch (for me, a LaTeX3 chat with Will Robertson and Bruno Le Floch), we headed back for what I think I’d call a ‘futures’ session. Bogusław Jackowskigv have us a ‘big picture’: what to do now that they have a ‘complete’ set of the OpenType maths fonts they set out to develop. We heard about the idea of fonts beyond the rigid box model and other exciting horizons. Frank Mittelbach then gave on overview of LaTeX kernel stability over the last 21 years. He looked at recent changes to how the team are making sure that the kernel stays stable while still fixing bugs and how that will work in the future. Hans Hagen then gave us something to think about: ‘what if?’. He talked about how TeX has developed based around the limitations of computers, data structures and ideas over time. The conflicts of the desires of users with technology and with developers was familiar to anyone who does any development.
Session four: News
The final session of the day focussed on ‘announcements’. Joachim Schrod gave us an overview of the structure of CTAN, telling us about the different interfaces for different users, and how the different parts interact. The talk gave us an insight into the hard work that goes on every day making TeX available to us all. I then popped back up for a short announcement about the status of the UK TeX FAQ since it moved to a new server. The formal business finished with a memorial for the losses in the last year to key (ex-)TeX people: Pierre MacKay, Richard Southall and Hermann Zapf. Three moving insights.