The second day of the meeting had a morning of talks and then the afternoon for the conference outing to the Messel Pit.
Morning two
Session one
The day started with a talk from Pavneet Arora telling us about something a bit different: detecting water leaks in property. Pavneet focussed on what most users want, the output rather the interface, and how this might lead us to a ‘TeX of Things’. He explained how he’s using TeX as part of a multi-tool chain to provide insight into water flow, using ConTeXt as the mechanism for making reports. All of this was based on Raspberry Pi to target embedded systems.
Tom Hejda then told us about his work creating two document classes: one for a journal and one for producing a thesis, both linked to his university. He contrasted the needs of users for these two document types. He showed us how he’d tackled this, with very different interfaces for two.
Next was Boris Veytsman one creating multiple bibliographies. He started at the end: looking at the ways you can access reference lists. You might want to look at references by date, by author, by reference callout or indeed by something else. Boris explained how he’s learned from his earlier multibibliography package to create a new package nmbib. This allows the user to select one or more views of the bibliography in the output.
Session two
After the coffee break, Boris returned along with Leyla Akhmadeeva looking at supporting a new medicinal institute in Russia. Leyla is a neurologist and laid out the needs for training doctors. Setting up a new institution in Bashkortostan means developing new communication templates. Boris showed us the requirements for multi-language documents following the Russian formal standard. He showed us the challenges of following those standards, particularly for when one of the languages (Bashkir) doesn’t currently have any hyphenation patterns available. He also talked about the design challenges of creating a beamer style using the colour elements from potentially clashing logos.
We then heard from Paul Gessler on converting Git logs into pretty-printed material using TikZ. Paul told us how he got started on the project, answering a question on TeX-StackExchange and getting pulled in by feature requests. He showed us his plans for turning Git branches into PDFs, and also how people have used Git branching to map the Paris Metro!
Question and answer session
The morning session finished with a Q&A to the TUG board. Topics were varied but the focus was on how we attract new users and new developer, and what is the meaning of a user group today. There’s a lot to talk about there, and we broken for lunch with informal chats going on.
Afternoon
The afternoon today features a visit to the Messel Pit. It will be an opportunity to talk about lots of things across the whole group attending. I’ll aim to report back later on the key topics.