The final day of the meeting offered another exciting mix of talks.
Morning three
Session one: Publishing
The day started with Kaveh Barzagan (new TUG President) and Jagath AR from River Valley Technology. They gave us an insight into the serious publishing end of the TeX world. Kaveh showed us the some of the ‘interesting’ features one sees in XML workflows, and explained how TeX can enable a XML-first approach. Jagath then showed us the way that they can integrate rich content into PDFs within this method.
Next was Joachim Schrod, who focussed on dealing with lots of documents: the needs of an online bank. Joachim explained the challenges of created hundreds of thousands of documents a month. In contrast to books or similar, these documents are all very similar and have very limited requirements. What is needed is resilience and speed. We saw how using LaTeX with knowledge of ‘classical’ TeX techniques (DVI mode and \special) can deliver key performance enhancements. He also told us about the challenges, particularly the human one: hiring (La)TeX experts for maintenance is not easy.
The third talk of the session came from S. K. Venkatesan and focussed on using TeX algorithms for scroll-like output. He showed how TeX compares with browsers in this area
Session two
After coffee, I was back on again to talk about \parshape. I talked about different elements of design of text which are best implemented at the primitive level using \parshape. I showed that we can provide interfaces for different aspects of the shape without the end user needing to know about the back-end detail. My talk was quite short but we got a lot of discussion!
Next was Julien Cretel, who talked about ideas for implementing Haskell-like functionality in TeX. Julien explained what he enjoys about functional languages, what has already been done in TeX and what he’d like to achieve. In particular, he focussed on tree data structures.
The final morning talk came from Hans Hagen. He started by showing us one of the challenges of grid setting: how to adjust design to accommodate overheight items. There are a lot of challenges, and he explained that there are probably more ways of tackling the problem than users! He then talked about bibliographies in ConTeXt and the reimplementation recently undertaken to use a flexible approach to cover many times of formatting. Hans finished with ‘ASCII math’ parsing, where all mathematics is represented with plain text. Here, Hans had the issue that the input format is rather flexible and not well defined.
Afternoon
After lunch, we had the group photo: there should be a lot of pictures available, given the number of budding photographers! We then reconvened for the final session.
Boris Vetysman gave his third talk of the meeting, looking at how we can arrangement for parts of files to be omitted from the output. He described two situations, missing out irrelevant data and omitting sensitive data. Boris showed how to tackle these two challenges by skipping material in the first case, and by stripping the sources in the second.
The final talk came from Enrico Gregorio (TeX-sx user egreg) and his recollections as a spurious space catcher. Enrico showed a collection of ‘interesting’ code, either with missing %, extra % or a curious mixture of both. He then showed us how to fix them, moving from manually setting catcodes for spaces and the like to using expl3 to avoid spacing issues, but also to avoid re-inventing the wheel.
Q&A Session
The final session was a free-form Question and Answer session. This led to interesting discussions on BibTeX databases, templates and source highlighting. It also meant we (formally) found out where the next meeting will be: Toronto, some time in early summer 2016.