Highlights from TUG 2005

Robin LaaksoTEX Users Groupoffice@tug.org

http://tug.org/tug2005

TUG 2005: International Typesetting Conferenceand the 26th annual meeting of the TEX UsersGroup, was held in Wuhan, China, from August23–25, 2005. CTUG (the Chinese TEX User Group),committed to handling the conference affairs. Con-gratulations to Hong Feng, chairman of CTUG, andall of his local help, including Chen HaiBin, HongChan, Gu XiongZhi, Hu WeiMing, Liu Hao, PengZiQiang, Wan Lin, Wu ZhenHua, Xu JiZhe, YaoWeiZhen, and Zhang YuanLin, for making the con-ference a unique experience and resounding success.

TEX users traveled from near and far to at-tend this year’s conference and tutorials. China,Australia, South Korea, Europe, India and NorthAmerica were all represented. Hong and/or ChenHaiBin, Wu ZhenHua, Peng ZiQiang met conferenceattendees at the airport outside of Wuhan arrangingbus and taxi transportation to our final destination,the East Lake Hotel in Wuchang, Wuhan. We wereinvited to enjoy a welcome dinner near the hotelupon our arrival— a restaurant setting that wouldbecome familiar over the next several days as theconference room was just down the hall, and wherebreakfast, lunch and dinner were served, included inthe registration.

A variety of brief tutorials was offered on Mon-day, August 22, the day before the conferenceopened. The instructors were a top notch fit with re-gard to their respective topics. The line-up included:Hong Feng, TEX as a Compiler; Ross Moore, LATEXto HTML Conversion; Hartmut Henkel, MetaPostfor Beginners; Hans Hagen, ConTEXt for Beginners,and Chris Rowley, who ended up choosing to forgohis LATEX for Beginners course as we were runningbehind schedule (and because there were scant fewbeginners in the room).

Wai Wong, with the Chinese University of HongKong, delivered a charming and informative keynoteaddress entitled “Typesetting Chinese: A personalperspective”. Wai’s presentation was followed byabout 20 talks over the three days, ranging from alook back at the design of TEX and METAFONT byNelson Beebe, to a look ahead at improving pdfTEXvia the LuaTEX team as presented by Hans Hagen.A wide range of topics was covered in-between, such

as accessing fonts in the operating system, amongother features of X ETEX, presented by its authorJonathan Kew, and using TEX in conjunction withother tools such as Perl and Excel, to sort, ana-lyze, and finally typeset the Byzantine Cappelli, pre-sented by Phil Taylor. Each and every one of thepresentations was well attended and enthusiasticallyreceived.

Wednesday afternoon, Jerzy Ludwichowski ofGUST and the Nicolaus Copernicus University inPoland summarized a bit about TEX user groupactivities worldwide. He passed along some ideasgenerated at BachoTEX such as producing a fontCD, perhaps including Chinese fonts, and settingup a Wiki about the history of TEX. Jerzy’s talkpreceded the TUG annual meeting where, after thegroup was updated about TUG business, upcomingconferences, and a proposed TEX Hall of Fame, dis-cussion focused on ways to increase both interest inTEX and membership in TUG. Suggestions rangedfrom advice about how to advertise TEX and TUG

nationally and internationally using a PR firm onthe web, to introducing a simple LATEX system tograde schoolers.

The conference officially concluded Thursdaywith a round-table panel. In the afternoon, manyattendees boarded a bus to tour a nearby archeo-logical museum and one of Chairman Mao’s formerresidences. Late afternoon that same day about halfthe group journeyed overnight by bus from Wuhanto the town of Wudang. After a rest and a tra-ditional Chinese breakfast, the group boarded thebus again, arriving at Wudang Mountain, the birth-place of Taoism, about an hour later. Onward andupward, though this time boarding gondolas twoby two, we continued our long vertical climb viapathways and stairs that eventually led to Taoisttemples, nunneries, temples on cliffs, bridges, pavil-ions and ancestral temples. Needless to say, theviews were spectacular from most locations on Wu-dang Mountain. And even though the journey fromWuhan to Wudang was a long one (thus some peo-ple departed Wudang Friday afternoon by train),the visit to this magnificent and special place wasappreciated by all.

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Highlights from TUG 2005

Some comments from attendees:— For the most part, I think it went pretty

well. It would have been helpful in planning travelto know in advance what the Wudang Mountain ex-pedition would involve; at the time I was booking myflights, there was no hint that this was more thana one-day excursion. (But despite the difficulties, Ivery much enjoyed going.)

— I think the local Wuhan tours were outstand-ing, and I loved them.

— I really enjoyed this conference. The bus rideto Wudang added to the richness of the trip, and I’mhappy to have had the experience. We saw a side ofChina we wouldn’t have seen otherwise.

— Once again, thank you very much for invit-ing me to TUG 2005. I did enjoy the talks and thediscussion during the conference very much. I learnta lot through them.

— I think the informal discussions we had dur-ing the panels were especially valuable. Some verygood ideas were exposed there, and would be lesslikely to come up in more formal settings such asregular lectures, were we often lack time to answerquestions comprehensively. Thus, I believe it wouldbe quite profitable to everyone to have more ofthese. However, I must admit I don’t know howthese scale up when there are more participants; wereally weren’t that many, probably because somepeople couldn’t make it to China.

— Hope to see you next year!

Sitting in chairs left to right: Chris Rowley, Sam Zoghaib, Ross Moore, Volker Schaa, Hong Feng,Hans Hagen, Jerzy Ludwichowski, Richard Kinch

Back, left to right: Yao Weizhen, Guo Liang, anonymous photographer, Liu Hao, Jonathan Kew,Eitan Gurari, Jin-Hwan Cho, Kevin Warnock, Joseph Rajendra, Hartmut Henkel, Candy Yiu, Maik Kundig,Le Khanh Au Duong, Karel Skoupy, Robin Laakso, Phil Taylor, Karel Pıska, Nelson Beebe, S.K. Venkatesan,Steve Grathwohl, Klaus Hoppner, Arthur Reutenauer, Lu Ming, Wu Zhenhua, Wai Wong.

Thanks to Hong Feng, William Adams, and Mare Joy Smith for work on this photograph for publication.

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