Barbara Beeton† American Mathematical Society Play (59min) Download: FLV | MOV | mp3

† Please note that the last part of this talk is incomplete due to recording problems on site.

When TUG was first formed, the Internet wasn’t generally available; the logical channel for communication with and among TUG’s members was on paper. So TUGboat came into being.

As TeX has matured, the needs of the community have evolved, but paper is still a logical medium for showcasing a typesetting tool.

This talk will introduce high- and low-lights in the history of TUGboat, some reasons for choosing its particular format and mode of presentation, several experiments, and lots of my personal experiences as editor.

Peter Flom National Development and Research Institutes Play (28min) Download: FLV | MOV | mp3

I will discuss some ways that some people who don’t use LaTeX (or ConTeXt or other TeX packages) might be encouraged to use it. I will concentrate on the case of social scientists, either in academia or in other research settings. I will also include a list of questions that I still have, or possible improvements, that might increase the utility of LaTeX for this group.

Jim Hefferon St. Michael’s College Play (36min) Download: FLV | MOV | mp3

One of the main practical advantages of using TeX via LaTeX is the existence of a great many, widely available, resources. These include add-on packages, books, articles, web pages, and a long history of question and answer discussions. We will discuss some of the main resources and how to use them, including some of most important add-on packages.

Boris Veytsman George Mason University and AES ITT Industries Play (44min) Download: FLV | MOV | mp3

There are many TeX packages available for creating presentations. Mostly they imitate the ubiquitous style of a certain tool, striving to produce Power-Point-like slides, hopefully with better typographical execution.

In this talk the principles of good design for presentations are considered. We discuss the problems with the common design of presentations as well as the famous proposition by Tufte to avoid slides at all. We try to formulate the principles of good presentation design and discuss TeX implementations from this point of view.

The discussion is based on the author’s experience in making slides for talks, lectures and training sessions.

Alan Wetmore US Army Play (33min) Download: FLV | MOV | mp3

I will discuss a somewhat novel use for TeX, preparing an after dinner speech for a scientific conference. My experience some years ago required me to prepare, at quite short notice whehn a scheduled dignatary ws forced to cancel, an entertaining diversion for the attendees of a conference banquet. Inspired by the then current popularity of Who wants to be a Millionaire?, and The Weakest Link, I produced a domain-specific trivia “contest” based on some frenzied Internet sleuthing. Formatted using pdfscreen and pdfLaTeX I produced an attractive presentation for the audience. In the process I learned a little about various TeX’s presentation capabilities. Some examples will be given.

Klaus Höppner DANTE e.V. Play (44min) Download: FLV | MOV | mp3

MetaType 1 is a tool created by Bogusław Jackowski, Janusz Nowacki, and Piotr Strzelczyk for creation of PostScript Type 1 fonts. It uses METAPOST, t1utils and some AWK scripts to start von a METAPOST sources with some special macros.

METAPOST was used to create the Latin Modern fonts, derived from Computer Modern fonts but including a lot of charactes with accents and nowadays part of most modern TEX distributions. Additionally some new fonts like Iwona and Kurier were created by the developers of MetaType 1.

I came into touch with METAPOST when I wanted to convert an existing logo font from METAFONT to PostScript Type 1. Unfortunately there doesn’t exist a ahndsome tutorial or cookbook for using MetaType 1. So I started to play with the example fonts supplied as part of MetaType 1 and to read the comments in the source. This tutorial will show a simple use case and the lessions I learnt.

Ned Hummel University of Nebraska Play (28min) Download: FLV | MOV | mp3

In the process of learning LaTeX there are a number of common pitfalls that many of us fall into at some point.

For most of us we encounter these pitfalls when writing macros for the first time. One of the great advantages of LaTeX is the ability to use macros to logically markup our document. Unfortunately, a number of us tend not to apply that same logical markup philosophy when writing macros.

We will consider a number of examples and discuss ways to re-write them using a logical markup philosophy.

Jonathan Kew SIL International Play (46min) Download: FLV | MOV | mp3

What is XeTeX?

• An extended TEX typesetting engine
• Using modern font technologies
  • TrueType, OpenType
  • no TeX-specific font installation or configuration needed
• With “smart rendering” support
  • Apple Advanced Typography (AAT)
  • OpenType Layout for typographic features and complex scripts
  • modern fonts are more than a collection of glyph images
• Supporting the Unicode character set
  • inherently multilingual/multiscript typesetting system
  • greatly simplifies language support

Federico Garcia University of Pittsburgh Play (54min) Download: FLV | MOV | mp3

With the proliferation of electronic publishing, the need of LaTeX users to master techniques of PDF interactivity is growing. This presentation discusses some of the immediate additions to ‘regular’ typesetting in the electronic environment, mainly the hypertext possibilities of hyperlinks and bookmarks.

Most of these things have already been implemented successfully in LaTeX, through the wonderful hyperref package. The first part of the presentation is devoted to illustrating these possibilities. Some ‘primitive’ commands of PDFTeX are referred to too.

There is an issue, however, that is not easy to solve at the author level: how to incorporate the entries in the lists of tables and of figures in their own sets of bookmarks. A solution for this, implemented by the document class ‘pittetd’ in 2003, is shown here.

Boris Veytsman*, Maria Shmilevich** * AES ITT Industries, ** George Mason University Play (min) Download: FLV | MOV | mp3

One of the most time-consuming task of a manager for a federal contractor is the creation of reports: weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly as well as special reports at the end of project or any given date. Such reports are usually made by copying and pasting the daily reports of subordinates.

The system described in this talk makes these reports automatically. The members of project team file their daily work results using a Web interface. These entries are kept in a SQL database. The report generation utility is launched through Web interface. It creates a TeX file by selecting the data relevant to the given set of contracts and tasks, employees, time periods, etc., and collating the individual reports. The result is then put through pdfTeX or latex2html or latex2rtf to create either a PDF report or editable (e.g. in Microsoft Word) file.

David Walden E. Sandwich, MA Play (41min) Download: FLV | MOV | mp3

The first section of this paper briefly relates my experience writing and printing documents until I began to us TeX. The second section summarizes why I now use TeX and gives examples of its benefits, particularly writing books. Section 3 touches on the advantage of being able to use a separate powerful text editor, since TeX does not require use of a built in editor.

Troy Henderson US Military Academy Play (37min) Download: FLV | MOV | mp3

MetaPost is a powerful graphics language (by John Hobby) based on Donald Knuth’s METAFONT with high quality PostScript output. An outstanding feature of MetaPost is that typeset fonts in the output graphics are consistent with those in TEX-based documents. In this talk we discuss a brief history of MetaPost as well as reasons for wanting to use it. We will also discuss some of the basic syntax of MetaPost coupled with several examples. Finally, we show how to include these graphics into LATEX documents as well as convert them to more web-friendly formats such as Portable Network Graphics (PNG) or Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG).

Andrew Mertz, William Slough Eastern Illinois University Play (36min) Download: FLV | MOV | mp3

Beautiful and expressive documents often require beautiful and expressive graphics. PGF, (portable graphics format) and its front-end TikZ walks a thin line between power, portability and usability, to give a TEX-like approach to graphics. While PGF and TikZ are extensively documented, first-time users may prefer learning about these packages using a collection of graduated examples. The examples presented here cover a wide spectrum of use, and provide a staring point for exploration.

Jon Breitenbucher College of Wooster Play (32min) Download: FLV | MOV | mp3

Does LaTeX have a place in a liberal arts education? Yes, and in this talk I present my reasons for introducing LaTeX in an undergraduate liberal arts setting. I also present how I introduced LaTeX, issues that were encountered, and what students and faculty think the impact has been.

This talk will be based on the paper published in PracTeX vol 2.

Steve Peter Beech Stave Press and TUG Play (27min) Download: FLV | MOV | mp3

This presentation serves as a gentle introduction to Peter Wilson’s memoir class, an alternative to the standard LaTeX classes. Memoir is quite flexible, and makes it easy to create beautiful book, article, and report designs, without having to search for, install, and load numerous third-party packages.

Peter Flynn, Jonathan Kew, Barbara Beeton… Play (50min) Download: FLV | MOV | mp3

Left to Right: Peter Flynn, Jonathan Kew, Barbara Beeton, Mirko Janc and Dave Walden (Moderator)

Peter Flynn Silmaril Consultants Play (44min) Download: FLV | MOV | mp3

LaTeX users who want to package their macro application as a document class file are often put off by the complexity of the sample classes in the standard distribution. This paper describes what the code in the article files does and suggests solutions to some of the popular requirements.

Federico Garcia University of Pittsburgh Play (36min) Download: FLV | MOV | mp3

The miriad of different styles for bibliography and reference layouts can be, in the main, classified into three main “families”: the ‘label’ family, where references are denoted with label, usually in [square parenthesis]; the ‘author-year’ family (Adorno, 1978); and the ‘footnote’ family. Although there are arguments for each of those families, the choice between them is, in the last analysis, decided by tradition: different disciplines have come to adopt different styles, and new generations of authors will naturally follow the uses of their predecessors (which are enforced also institutionally, for example with journal guidelines).

LaTeX itself (with BibTeX) is designed toward the label family. Some packages, like cite, provide extra utilities in that family. The other two families are reflected in the LaTeX world by special packages. The author-year family is well illustrated by packages such as harvard, natbib, and achicago. Footnote-style references are implemented by the package opcit. A basic description of these packages follows. I will spend relatively longer with opcit, that is comparatively recent (2002) and the one I know best. A new release of it, moreover, is planned for the summer.

Kaveh Bazargan River Valley Technologies Play (36min) Download: FLV | MOV | mp3

One of TeX’s advantages over traditional typesetting systems is the mechanism to stretch horizonal and vertical glue as needed, in order to aid paragraph building and pagination. But all TeX operators involved in day-to-day page make-up know that this inbuilt intelligence is often `too clever’ and frustrating for the user. TeX will not do what you want it to do, and only over many years can operators gain the knowledge that allows them to make just the right change to the source code in order to coerce TeX to produce the desired result.

Recently we have been experimenting with removing vertical stretchability, with promising results. Our approach is to round off the height of all vertical material, including floats and displayed equations, to be an integral number of the leading of the main text. One advantage is that this allows true ‘grid’ setting in double column text. A live demonstration will be presented, showing our latest results.

Lance Carnes Play (21min) Download: FLV | MOV | mp3

PracTeX stands for “practical TeX” and focuses on the techniques and experiences of LaTeX and TeX users in document production. In the TeX community there are many opportunities for expert users and developers to share information but there are relatively few for beginning, intermediate, and production users. By providing more practical materials and opportunities for this large group of users the TeX community can grow and TeX can become more widely used. In this brief talk I will describe what “practical” TeX is, examine a few of the current offerings, and suggest some ideas that might be implemented in the future.

Onofrio de Bari Play (23min) Download: FLV | MOV | mp3

The intent of this article is to collect information and useful resources for using the editor GNU Emacs with a AUCTEX in the drafting of documents LATEX, presenting instructions and recommendations that up to now have not been brought to the attention of users with documents in Italian. In a first analysis we introduce the GNU Emacs editor, then dwelling on its logical structure and what instructions can be given to Emacs in order to be convenient to use with TeX and LaTeX, are finally analyzed in detail the software modules AUCTEX and preview-latex useful in preparing the source code and display prior document.

Jean-Michel Hufflen Play (26min) Download: FLV | MOV | mp3

This paper shows the architecture of MlBibTeX, our reimplementation of BibTeX focusing on multilingual features. Making precise the organisation and modules of this architecture allows us to show how MlBibTeX works and focus on the differences between MlBibTeX and BibTeX from a conceptual point of view. We also explain why this implementation using the Scheme programming language allows users to scrutinise the result of intermediate steps.

Kaveh Bazargan, CV Radhakrishnan Play (25min) Download: FLV | MOV | mp3

One of TeX’s advantages over traditional typesetting systems is the mechanism to stretch horizonal and vertical glue as needed, in order to aid paragraph building and pagination. But all TeX operators involved in day-to-day page make-up know that this inbuilt intelligence is often ‘too clever’ and frustrating for the user. TeX will not do what you want it to do, and only over many years can operators gain the knowledge that allows them to make just the right change to the source code in order to coerce TeX to produce the desired result.

Recently we have been experimenting with removing vertical stretchability, with promising results. Our approach is to round off the height of all vertical material, including floats and displayed equations, to be an integral number of the leading of the main text. One advantage is that this allows true ‘grid’ setting in double column text.

Lapo Mori, Maurizio Himmelmann Play (31min) Download: FLV | MOV | mp3

The purpose of this article is to provide the tools to create and format tables using LATEX2e correctly. This is achieved by analyzing the typical problems encountered during the creation of tables and possible solutions; it pays particular attention to the packages to be used in different circumstances. For individual cases are reported and examples, please refer to the manuals of the packages suggested, if necessary.

Enrico Gregorio Play (27min) Download: FLV | MOV | mp3

TeX works with lists of tokens that form as they read letters from a document. Tex. Understanding the process of division in token is important if you want to change the usual behavior of TeX. In this respect the concept of category code assigned to a character is essential. Of particular interest are the active characters. Will give you an application that exploits some of the new features of e-TeX.

Roberta Tucci Play (26min) Download: FLV | MOV | mp3

This article consists of three parts: a first part in which they are exposed some philological problems that occur when there is going to make an issue of a critical mathematics, a second type of description, which presents the tools information (MAUROTEX and MetaPost) have been chosen for the edition, a third party in which they are exposed briefly the results obtained from the use of these instruments.

Massimiliano Dominici, Pier Daniele Napolitani Play (39min) Download: FLV | MOV | mp3

The Project Maurolico was born some years ago with the aim of publishing, in print and electronic versions of the critical edition of the works of Francesco Maurolico (1494-1575). As part of this project was a system, MAURO-TeX which, with a language of mark-up type LaTeX allows, through the use of special tools, to obtain an output html for publication on the Internet and a standard LaTeX output format as an intermediate to pdf and postscript. MAURO-TeX is undergoing profound transformation. On one side is moving towards the xml the part for encoding text, the other starting the printed publication of the works is an opportunity for a thorough review of the macro used by the intermediate format to generate LaTeX output pdf and postscript.

Jerònimo Leal Play (32min) Download: FLV | MOV | mp3

The article has some experience on a course of LaTeX for printing critical. Here are treated the two organizational steps of the course. First, the preparation: the choice of distribution, the editor choice, preparation of lectures, exercises and examples, advertising and subscription, and then the realization: send the material, installation, testing and analysis of the results.

Salvatore Palma Play (29min) Download: FLV | MOV | mp3

In the 2005/06 school year just ended, I started to realize the site of a school rehabilitation project and depth of subjects of Mathematics and Physics for my students. In my work I use mainly AcroTex Professor DP Story of the University of Akron and PdfScreen CV Radhakrishnan.

Gustavo Cevolani Play (31min) Download: FLV | MOV | mp3

The first part of the article presents the main methods available in LaTeX to print leaflets (leaflets), printed a few pages (brochures) and real books (books). The second part presents some examples of code and its result (examples), as well to consider some alternative methods (Appendices psutils and more).

Ari Stern Caltech Play (9min) Download: FLV | MOV | mp3

“Due to computer hardware difficulties, Ari could not deliver his talk effectively. He has kindly created a screen recording instead, which we are showing here.”

Dick Koch University of Oregon Play (27min) Download: FLV | MOV | mp3

MacTeX is a TeX installation package for Mac OS X designed by Jonathan Kew. I maintain it and will describe its latest incarnation.

Kaveh Bazargan River Valley Technologies Play (36min) Download: FLV | MOV | mp3

Kaveh Bazargan of River Valley Technologies, who provide specialist typesetting and content management services to major academic publishing houses.

Nicholas Jackson Warwick University Play (40min) Download: FLV | MOV | mp3

Nicholas Jackson is Production Editor of Geometry and Topology, http://msp.warwick.ac.uk/gt/, a major electronic-only journal published from Warwick University.

Tim Lowe Mathematics Online Project, UK Play (44min) Download: mp3

Tim Lowe of the Mathematics Online Project, whose primary aim is to develop and support both infrastructure and content for online learning and teaching of mathematical material at degree and postgraduate level. Tim will talk about mathematics in Moodle.

Jonathan Fine Open University, Milton Keynes Play (44min) Download: mp3

Jonathan Fine of the Open University will be talking about the JISC funded MathTran project.

Arthur Reutenauer Paris, France Play (15min) Download: FLV | MOV | mp3

As everybody knows, TeX is moving towards full Unicode support with the new XeTeX and LuaTeX engines, which enabled UTF–8 input, multidirectional typesetting, and direct use of OpenType fonts, etc. etc. … Does it mean we’re there yet? Are XeTeX and LuaTeX really Unicode–compliant?

Of course, those engines can read Unicode–encoded text directly, without resorting to complicated macros, and they can typeset Unicode characters using advanced fonts. But Unicode is much more than a pile of characters: it associate a number of properties with each one of them, and it defines transformation of character streams.

Examples include handling of combining marks: when you put such a character after a “normal” one (called base character), the former is supposed to be displayed as a diacritical mark. This isn’t supported at all in TeX — of course, TeX has always been able to handle accents, but it has done so in its own way, without putting it in relation with Unicode. Another very interesting example is bidirectional typesetting: experiments have been done as early as 1987 to mix texts in different writing directions in TeX, but there has been very little effort to support the “Unicode way” of doing so, namely, the so–callled bidirectional algorithm.

There are more such examples, and each one of them uncovers what I would like to call the “TeX way” of text processing, which is often very different from the “Unicode way”. It even looks like both approaches are completely opposite: while TeX strives to produce the best final result and loses a lot of the original input in the process, Unicode prescribes ways to handle plain text and shows little interest for the displayed appearance. This talk is an attempt to give an overview of those two ways, and to discuss options on how to unite them in order to implement Unicode support in the different “modern” TeX engines, with a particular emphasis on LuaTeX with ConTeXt as a macro package (also known as “Mark IV”).

Martin Schröder Bremen, Germany Play (29min) Download: FLV | MOV | mp3

The next version of pdfTeX, 1.50, will be released soon after this year’s BachoTeX. We will present its new features.

Jonathan Kew SIL International Play (32min) Download: FLV | MOV | mp3

One of the most successful TeX interfaces in recent years has been Dick Koch’s award–winning TeXShop on Mac OS X. I believe a large part of its success has been due to its relative simplicity, which has invited new users to begin working with the system without baffling them with options or cluttering their screen with controls and buttons they don’t understand. Experienced users may prefer environments such as iTeXMac, AUCTeX (or on other platforms, WinEDT, Kile, TeXmaker, or many others), with more advanced editing features and project management, but the simplicity of the TeXShop model has much to recommend it for the new or ocasional user.

Besides the relatively “clean” interface, a second factor in TeXShop’s success is probably its PDF–centric workflow, with pdfTeX as the default typesetting engine. PDF is the de facto standard for fully–formatted pages, and every user knows what a PDF file is and what they can do with it. Bypassing DVI reduces the apparent complexity of the overall process, and so reduces the “intimidation factor” for a newcomer. But TeXShop is built on Mac OS X–specific technologies, and is available only to Mac users. There does not seem to be an equivalent tool available on other platforms; there are many TeX editors and environments, but none with this particular focus.

This is the background to TeXworks, which aims to provide a simple TeX environment based on modern standards — including Unicode encoding and PDF output by default — with an uncluttered interface that does not overwhelm the newcomer. It is built using cross–platform, open–source tools and libraries, so as to be available on all today’s major operating systems, with a native “look and feel” for each.

TeXworks also works with the new SyncTeX extension designed by Jérôme Laurens for pdfTeX and XeTeX, to provide a two–way link between source text and PDF output without requiring any modifications to the source document or support at the macro package level.

This presentation will discuss the goals and features of the TeXworks project, describe the implementation that has been developed, and show the capabilities of the current prototype.

Arthur Reutenauer Paris, France Play (29min) Download: FLV | MOV | mp3

People are often confused by the wealth of programs called “TeX” and variations thereof. This is quite understandable: there must be at least a dozen such names and they can have really different natures, from core engines to macro packages to distributions. And a distressed question naturally arises: why are there so many different versions of TeX and what is their use? Is there some kind of rivalry between them? Are we going to have a duel in the main TeX street some day (at High Noon)?

After my historical account last year, I will try to take a snapshot of the current situation by describing the different TeX parties and coalitions, for the benefit of all the citizens of TeX town, old TeX timers and TeX tenderfeet alike.

Hans Hagen, David Kastrup, Jonathan Kew, Marek Ryćko…   Play (57min) Download: FLV | MOV | mp3

Panel: Hans Hagen, David Kastrup, Jonathan Kew, Marek Ryćko, Martin Schröder, Volker RW Schaa & Ulrik Vieth

The “TeX contra TeX” day will be — hopefully — summarized during the panel discussion with the above mentioned panelists.

Jean-Michel Hufflen Besançon, France Play (26min) Download: FLV | MOV | mp3

When a bibliography is built by extracting references from a data base — as BibTeX does when it builds a bibliography for a LaTeX document — these references are usually sorted w.r.t. author names. Nevertheless, most of implementations of lexical order relations on person names consist of concatenations of the parts of name: first name, particle, last name. We show that this may lead to incorrect results in some particular cases (some examples are given using BibTeX). Then we explain how this problem is solved in MlBibTeX, our multilingual reimplementation of BibTeX.

David Kastrup Bochum, Germany Play (40min) Download: FLV | MOV | mp3

The bigfoot package for arranging footnote apparatus for text–critical editions offers several advantages for ordinary documents as well.

While user–visible development has been somewhat slow, the currently released version offers new compatibility features to various other packages, and the remaining problems for typesetting a large–scale book project have been tackled, including a load of bug fixes in the optimization. The results are staggeringly æsthetic page break decisions in the most complicated circumstances.

But even the standard single–apparatus situation benefits from bigfoot.sty : once breaking a footnote can’t be avoided, the combined selection of footnote and main text breaks can be used to avoid widows, clubs or hyphens across page breaks. Additionally, color in footnotes and fragile or verbatim text is supported.

Grzegorz Murzynowski Warszawa, Poland Play (18min) Download: FLV | MOV | mp3

Where does the name come from: “Zasady typowego opracowania edytorskiego” (“The rules for typical editorial tasks”); PWN 1964. “Edda poetycka” (“The poetic Edda”) by the National Library as an additional source of inspiration. The author in an antiqua or uppercase? Using Makebst thus simply a form. Hand tuning: “s.” and “ss.” instead of “str.” (“p.” and “pp.” instead of “page” and “pages”) etc.

Jacek Kmiecik Kraków, Poland Play (21min) Download: FLV | MOV | mp3

A few simplest ways for tuning of the canonical LaTeX macros to one’s own typographical requirements will be presented.

Piotr Krakowiak*, Tomasz Łuczak** * dragonia.pl, Poland, ** Gliwice, Poland Play (29min) Download: FLV | MOV | mp3

The Dragonia Magazine is a monthly free e–zine published since 2006. It is devoted to GNU/Linux and Free Software. Most of the issues were typeset with Scribus, one with InDesign but the latest are typeset with LaTeX. We will show the abilities and restrictions of typesetting of a periodical with several dozen pages with Scribus, the reasons behind the migration to typesetting with LaTeX and the results — or what was gained and what was lost.

Grzegorz Murzynowski Warszawa, Poland Play (36min) Download: FLV | MOV | mp3

The “102 listy” by E. Szarzyński is a series of letters which he wrote to himself just before commiting suicide. Fairy tales like colorful papers with calligraphic handwriting have been bound into a book which by being richly addorned reminds of medieval incunabula. Preparing it for print we decided for one color (black) ink and instead of reproducing the adornments to provide their descriptions which gives our edition a rather conceptual character.

I intend to report on fonts we used and typographical conventions which aim at a clear separation of the editorial level, which describes the original, from Szarzyński’s text, at the same time trying to reflect the conventions used by the author.

The engine I am using since at least half a year is XeTeX, currently in version 0.997. I am using the availability of the OpenType fonts visible with the system, the possibilities to easily declare the features available through fontspec and the new conveniences offered by XeTeX like the pseudo–feature “slant”. I will describe how XeTeX serves the æstetic of a book.

I intend to tell the audience a couple of words about the basic typesetting parameters, such as tolerance and emergencystretch in the context of their role for the appearance of the work.

If time allows, I will present a few tricks, such as typesetting of a fragment longer than a page in such a way that all “t” characters are typeset as crosses (as in the Szarzyński’s original).

Robert Oleś Kraków, Polska Play (62min) Download: FLV | MOV | mp3

The quest for one’s own style in book form design should resist the temptations of schemes and norms but at the same time should not break with harmony and logic, which constitute the foundation of æsthetic.

Using examples, I will present problematic elements of typographic style which in typesetting usually result in compromises from the clash between differing importance hierarchies dividing the designer and the editor.

Adam Twardoch Berlin, Germany Play (67min) Download: FLV | MOV | mp3

If we walk into a bookshop in Berlin and Warsaw, we immediately see vast differences in the editorial quality of books that are published at the east and west side of the Oder river. German fiction books intended for everyday use present appealing covers, good typographic design, are made with good paper and binding. Analogical Polish publications look much worse. Polish publishers tend to fail at tasks even as simple as the choice of typeface and column proportions. It is a chicken–and–egg problem whether modest publication runs and small profits prevent Polish publishers from making higher–quality books or if the low æsthetic quality of the books stops the clients from buying them. One is certain: good design can sell a product. Adam Twardoch will present his manifesto, calling for taking design and typography seriously when books are made.

Paweł Jackowski Kraków, Poland Play (42min) Download: FLV | MOV | mp3

What is wanted:

• short TeX, MetaFont or MetaPost macro/macros (half A4 page or half a screen at most),
• the code should be generic, potentially understandable by plain–oriented users,
• results need not be useful or serious, but language–specific, tricky, preferably non–obvious,
• obscure oddities, weird TeX behaviour, dirty and risky tricks and traps are also welcome,
• the code should be explainable in a couple of minutes.

More details…

Andrzej Tomaszewski Warszawa, Poland Play (62min) Download: FLV | MOV | mp3

Professor Janusz Tondel from the Nicolas Copernicus University of Toruń, Poland, researched for sevaral years the incunabula from the Pelplin library. The resulting book was a big challenge for the designer. I will describe the meeting of a contemporary book designer with the history of books and the exceptional personality of the Professor.

Piotr Fuglewicz Katowice, Poland Play (27min) Download: FLV | MOV | mp3

As any human activity, spellchecking might be an art. In my presentation I will try to tell about my more than fifteen years of working on different realizations of a Polish spellchecker. I will also try to present possible functionalities, which so far are not in use in any of the commercial spellchecker I know of. Finally I will present my views on why instead of a top–of–the–art text correction facility producers rather deliver a piece of spellchecker in their products. (A remark for foreign language speakers: in the Polish language “art” and “piece” are homonymous, i.e., translate to one word – “sztuka”.)

David Kastrup Bochum, Germany Play (34min) Download: FLV | MOV | mp3

Emacs 22.1 has been released last year and is pretty much available in every up–to–date serious software collection. Emacs 22.2, mostly a bug–fix release, is slated to appear “soon”, and development on Emacs 23.1 continues at a rapid pace. Both the multi–tty and unicode–2 feature branches have been merged and problems are being shaken out. Release management has been passed from Richard Stallman to Stefan Monnier and Chong Yidong.

For the TeX/LaTeX user, Emacs 22.1 offers improved Unicode support for editing, advanced version control system integration, desktop interaction and input, syntax highlighting activated by default, new ports for Windows, MacOSX and GTK+ using the native toolkits for graphic support and toolbars and providing a native, well integrated look for those desktop environments, transparent access to files accessible with su, sudo, ssh and other shell accounts: in short, finding a good reason to leave your Emacs window as the central work integration point is becoming more difficult.

The development of the TeX authoring environment AUCTeX has been at somewhat less break-neck speed, though. Some consolidation has happened, some packages are supported better than previously, some setups work better out of the box. By now, most changes are of evolutionary nature. Best supported are still LaTeX and .dtx files, while plain TeX and ConTeXt support is not worked on fervently at the moment.

The RefTeX package for managing cross references and bibliographical citations in LaTeX has been placed into the AUCTeX repository and is maintained and released from there.

Jean-Michel Hufflen Besançon, France Play (34min) Download: FLV | MOV | mp3

This article focuses on the new features introduced by Version 2.0 of XSLT, the language of transformations used for XML texts. We show why these new features — groups of XML subtrees, functions, interface with schemas — ease the development of some applications. Some examples, related to bibliography management, will be demonstrated.

Marcin Woliński Warszawa, Poland Play (59min) Download: FLV | MOV | mp3

As this tutorial is intended for beginners rather, we will start by an overview of the basic LaTeX commands for choosing a font, its variant and size. We will reply to recurring on the discussion list questions about how to depart from the standard Computer Modern set of fonts. We then will briefly glance at the available free fonts allowing typesetting of Polish language texts. Further, we will look closer at the LaTeX model of using fonts which will allow to solve the problem of making the chosen font available to LaTeX.

I assume that my part will not fill the allocated time and that the rest of it will be devoted to questions from participants (it would be nice to have then in advance).

Andrzej Odyniec Warszawa, Poland Play (78min) Download: FLV

A few words on OTF fonts (a few because the subject can not be exhausted, one can only dip ones toe).

Examples of their use in TeX installations:

1. conversion to Type1 fonts,
2. through use in XeTeX.

I will try to show an ornamental design with frills, typeset with XeTeX… perhaps a wedding invitation? Yes. That’s a good idea. An addressed invitation to a wedding.

Examples of the use of such fonts in programs like Adobe Illustrator or Adobe InDesign.

The presentation is intended to take a form of a demo rather than of a lecture.

Michał Kolany Katowice, Poland Play (10min) Download: FLV | MOV | mp3

As the title says. A presentation by an angry youngster.