Dominik Wujastyk Austria Play (35min)

In 2010, I typeset a 650-page book of memoirs, political essays, and biographical sketches written by my 97-year-old father. The book is in the Polish language, and was published by the University of Lublin. For the design and typsetting I made choices that stylistically echoed my father’s life-long links with Malta and Poland. Due to financial restrictions at the University of Lublin, I worked out a cost-effective pathway for printing and distribution using an American web-based printing and distribution service. The final result is of a high standard, and has been gratifyingly well received by all parties. Some niggles remain, however, regarding publicity and distribution. In this paper, I shall describe my choices and discoveries in producing my father’s book.

Petr Sojka Masaryk University, Czech Republic Play (40min)

TeX is around 30 years old, and was conceived and written before the advent of MathML, not to mention the Internet. At that time the idea of indexing and searching mathematics was just a futuristic idea. When people jumped on the Google bandwagon, it was predicted that old technologies such as TeX mark-up for math would disappear in time (it is not used for tokenization and indexing properly). The advent of the Internet and \acro{W3C} brought mark-up and global search to the attention of the public. Somehow it was acceptable again. The recent move to the semantic search and MathML has brought renewed attention to the need of unambiguous canonical math representation in texts.

As part of the project of building the European Digital Mathematics Library (\url{http://www.eudml.eu}) we have designed and implemented a math search engine, \acro{MI}a\acro{S} (\url{http://nlp.fi.muni.cz/projekty/eudml/mias}). It currently indexes and searches in more than 160,000,000 formulae originally written by authors in TeX in their scientific papers. We will present the system and will discuss the ways towards global math search engine based on the TeX math notation.

Manjusha Joshi Pune, India Play (19min)

Researchers search for some computational package for their results. At the time when they have good output, they begin worrying about how to insert it in their LaTeX document. They have to keep track of their output, formatting and then insert it at the appropriate places in the document.

The SageTeX package is a blessing in these situations. It calls the powerful open source maths server Sage, to compute and embed the result into a TeX document.

Stefan Kottwitz Germany Play (35min)

It all began in the 1980s with mailing lists such as \code{texhax}, and Usenet. The online discussion board \code{comp.text.tex} emerged around 1990, where TeX hackers gathered and still frequent it today.

On the continuously developing Internet, TeX user groups created mailing lists, built home pages and software archives. Web forums turned up and lowered the barrier for beginners and occasional TeX users for getting support.

Today, TeX’s friends can also follow blogs, news feeds, and take part in vibrant question and answer sites.

In this talk we will look at present online TeX activities.

Kannan Moudgalya Indian Institute of Science, India Play (23min)

]]> http://river-valley.tv/spoken-tutorials-case-study-latex/feed/ 0 http://river-valley.tv/on-the-use-of-tex-as-a-general-markup-language-for-html5/#utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=on-the-use-of-tex-as-a-general-markup-language-for-html5 http://river-valley.tv/on-the-use-of-tex-as-a-general-markup-language-for-html5/#comments Fri, 21 Oct 2011 06:55:29 +0000 Admin http://river-valley.tv/?p=10785

S.K. Venkatesan TNQ Books and Journals, India Play (34min)

The TeX syntax has been fairly successful at marking-up a variety of scientific and technical literature, making it an ideal authoring syntax. The brevity of the TeX syntax makes it difficult to create overlapping structures, which in the case of HTML has made life so difficult for XML purists. We discuss S-expressions, the TeX syntax and how it can help reduce the nightmare that the HTML5 markup is going to create. Apart from this we implement a new syntax for marking-up semantic information (microdata) in TeX.

Sukumar Sankar, S Mahalakshmi, L Ganesh TNQ Books and Journals, India Play (21min)

HTML5 and CSS3 are becoming the popular language of choice in the web. However, quite like HTML, CSS is prone to errors and difficult to port, so we propose an XML version of CSS that can be used as a standard for creating stylesheets and templates across different platforms and pagination systems. XLaTeX and TeXML are some examples of XML that are close in spirit to TeX that can benefit from such an approach. Modern TeX systems like XeTeX and LuaTeX use simplified \code{fontspec} macros to create style sheets and templates. We use XSLT to create mappings from this XML-style sheet language to \code{fontspec}-based TeX templates and also to CSS3. We also provide user friendly interfaces for the creation of such an XML style sheet.

Jean-luc Doumont Principiae, Belgium Play (33min)

In its ability to generate graphical elements, TeX is basicallylimited to horizontal and vertical black rules. Extended versions such as pdfTeX add color options and, especially, the possibilityto draw more freely on the page by inserting raw code (PDF code in thecase of pdfTeX). Still, these two coding environmentsDash TeX andPDFDash are too often regarded as disjoint. It would be nice tointegrate them seamlessly, for example, to use in PDF code a color ora dimension assigned or calculated in TeX. This presentation pointsout the challenges of such a consistent and transparent TeX–PDFintegration, proposes a set of solutions, and illustrates how thesesolutions help create graphs flexibly or design pages consistently ona grid.

Pavneet Arora Ontario, Canada Play (26min)

]]> http://river-valley.tv/typesetting-with-masonry/feed/ 0 http://river-valley.tv/typesetting-sanskrit-in-various-alphabets-xelatex-tec-files-hyphenation-and-even-xml/#utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=typesetting-sanskrit-in-various-alphabets-xelatex-tec-files-hyphenation-and-even-xml http://river-valley.tv/typesetting-sanskrit-in-various-alphabets-xelatex-tec-files-hyphenation-and-even-xml/#comments Thu, 20 Oct 2011 10:50:53 +0000 Admin http://river-valley.tv/?p=10713

Dominik Wujastyk Austria Play (37min)

The XeTeX extended TeX engine provides a wealth of sophisticated features, and meets many of the long-felt needs of people working with multilingual or multi-script texts. I shall describe the use of XeLaTeX for typesetting Sanskrit, with both Roman- and Devanagari-script inputs, and Roman- and Devanagari-script outputs. I shall describe the complexities of getting differently hyphenated Sanskrit in different scripts. Finally, I shall offer an example of a free IBM XML tool that uses a XeLaTeX TEC file to auto-convert Sanskrit between Roman and Devanagari for screen display via HTML. If all this sounds a bit messy, it is. But the results are sometimes quite amazing, and open up exciting possibilities for the beautiful printing of Indian texts.

Karel Skoupý River Valley, Trivandrum, India Play (42min)

We used TeX for typesetting a series of phrase books with a fancy graphical design. Each book contained the same content for a different language pair. There were several dozens of them semi-automatically generated and thanks to the way how the language data were organized and thanks to TeX as a typesetting engine this process was very time and cost effective.

We have developed interesting TeX macro modules and used many advanced features of pdf TeX and Lua TeX to meet the challenges raised by the graphical design and by some non-Latin script languages. We will show the general structure and discuss some interesting problems and their pdf TeX slash Lua TeX solutions.

Boris Veytsman1, Leyla Akhmadeeva2 1George Mason University, USA, 2Bashkir State Medical University, Russia Play (29min)

]]> http://river-valley.tv/towards-evidence-based-typography-experiment-design/feed/ 0 http://river-valley.tv/latex3-architecture-and-current-work-in-progress/#utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=latex3-architecture-and-current-work-in-progress http://river-valley.tv/latex3-architecture-and-current-work-in-progress/#comments Thu, 20 Oct 2011 06:55:13 +0000 Admin http://river-valley.tv/latex3-architecture-and-current-work-in-progress/

Frank Mittelbach LaTeX3 Project Play (41min)

]]> http://river-valley.tv/latex3-architecture-and-current-work-in-progress/feed/ 0 http://river-valley.tv/toward-latex-coding-standards/#utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=toward-latex-coding-standards http://river-valley.tv/toward-latex-coding-standards/#comments Thu, 20 Oct 2011 06:20:25 +0000 Admin http://river-valley.tv/?p=10709

Didier Verna EPITA R&D Laboratory, France Play (38min)

Because LaTeX (and ultimately TeX) is only a macro-expansion system, the language does not impose any kind of good software engineering practice, program structure or coding style whatsoever on you. As a consequence, writing beautiful code (for some definition of “beautiful”) requires a lot of self-discipline from the programmer.

Maybe because in the LaTeX world, collaboration is not so widespread (most packages are single-authored), the idea of some LaTeX Coding Standards is not so pressing as with other programming languages. Some people may, and probably have, developed their own programming habits, but when it comes to the LaTeX world as a whole, the situation is close to anarchy.

Over the years, the permanent flow of personal development experiences contributed to shape my own taste in terms of coding style. The issues involved are numerous and their spectrum is very large: they range from simple code layout (formatting, indentation, naming schemes etc.), mid-level concerns such as modularity and encapsulation, to very high-level concerns like package interactionslash conflict management and even some rules for proper social behavior.

In this talk, I will report on all these experiences and describe what I think are good (or at least better) programming practices. I believe that such practices do help in terms of code readability, maintainability and extensibility, all key factors in software evolution. They help me, perhaps they will help you too.

Brian Housley GCCS GmbH, Switzerland Play (29min)

There are many packages for making letters and page headings with logos, etc., in \LaTeX, but many do not take into account user changes to the page dimensions and so the heading may not be in the correct, centred, place. Also, the user should be able to specify different types of letter, including private ones, without having to use another version of the package. We describe how to achieve a package to produce headings and letters which is robust against page layout changes and which permits the user to define all the fields, including the logo, himself. Obviously, to redesign the presented headings one must be a little versed in \AllTeX\ but the user specifies his own details very easily. Described will be: 1)~How to determining the absolute position of the heading on the page. 2)~Support for various language styles. 3)~Using class option (\code{.clo}) files for defining types of letters\Dash standard office, private, signed letters, etc. 4)~Using class option files to specify the user information (name, address, etc.)\ for the various letter types and languages. 5)~Producing letters, merge letters (possible signed) and headings. 6)~Ensuring the letter to-address fits in a C5 and C5/6 window. 7)~Hints on how to change the heading to your own style. The talk should be suitable for general users.

Jean-Michel Hufflen University of Franche-Comté, France Play (39min)

First, we recall the successive steps of the task performed by a bibliography processor such as \BibTeX. Then we show how this modus operandi has been adapted by tools such as the packages \code{natbib}, \code{jurabib}, \code{biblatex}. We also explain the advantages and drawbacks of using other processors like Biber or Ml\BibTeX.

T. Rishi River Valley, Trivandrum, India Play (33min)

]]> http://river-valley.tv/automated-generation-of-epub-from-latex/feed/ 0 http://river-valley.tv/ebooks-and-paper-size-output-routine-hacking-made-easy/#utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=ebooks-and-paper-size-output-routine-hacking-made-easy http://river-valley.tv/ebooks-and-paper-size-output-routine-hacking-made-easy/#comments Wed, 19 Oct 2011 10:15:48 +0000 Admin http://river-valley.tv/?p=10775

Boris Veytsman1, Michael Ware 1George Mason University, USA Play (29min)

]]> http://river-valley.tv/ebooks-and-paper-size-output-routine-hacking-made-easy/feed/ 0 http://river-valley.tv/e-readers-and-latex/#utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=e-readers-and-latex http://river-valley.tv/e-readers-and-latex/#comments Wed, 19 Oct 2011 09:15:55 +0000 Admin http://river-valley.tv/?p=10773

Alan Wetmore US Army Research Laboratory Play (43min)

2011 has seen many e-readers arrive on store shelves; a new generation of “touch screen” devices including the Nook Simple Touch, Kobo eReader Touch, and i-River Story HD. They all have a capability of loading user created content, so the question arises; how well can they support my legacy documents? The answer might be surprisingly well. After we understand the capabilities and some of the limitations we will explore how we can re-purpose older documents and prepare new LaTeX documents for use with these e-readers.

Kaveh Bazargan River Valley, UK Play (10min)

TeX is around 30 years old, and was conceived and written before the advent of laser printers, personal computers, PostScript and of course the Internet. At that time the idea of WYSIWYG document editing was just a futuristic idea. When people jumped on the WYSIWYG bandwagon, it was predicted that old technologies such as TeX which used mark-up for text would disappear in time. The advent of the Internet brought mark-up to the attention of the public. Somehow it was acceptable again. The recent move to the semantic web and HTML5 has brought renewed attention to mark-up and the need for clear structure in text. I suggest that we have gone full circle and now realise that mark-up is everything. And TeX, which has the most readable and minimalist mark-up might just be the best tool today for structured documentation.

Karel Skoupý River Valley, Brno, Czech Republic Play (36min)

For the construction of macro packages, TeX is used as a programming language. Unlike general programming languages it lacks complex data structures. We present the experience of providing record and array data structures and the supporting operations using eTeX features. They were successfully applied in real projects for parametrization and as a base for special table module involving complex dimension calculations. We will show how the abstraction level provided by more powerful data-structures can simplify and unify TeX low-level code.

CV Radhakrishnan River Valley, Trivandrum, India Play (32min)

There are several technologies to translate LaTeX sources into other markup formats like HTML, XML and MathML. TeX4ht assumes a premier position among them owing to the fact that it makes use of the TeX compiler for translation, which helps to assimilate any complex author macros used in the document. This talk provides an overview of how to configure TeX4ht to output custom markup needed by users.

Rishi T River Valley, Trivandrum, India Play (31min)

PDF has a rich specification. But Adobe Distiller does not exploit all these specifications. We’ll demonstrate how pdfTeX can create useful PDF files that are difficult or impossible to create using other technologies. Examples are: PDFs showing differences in two TeX source files; PDFs with useful pop-up tools; and a simple but useful composite PDF for comparing two nearly identical PDF files.

Ross Moore Macquarie University, Australia Play (48min) Download: FLV | MOV | OGG | MP3

This is the 3rd presentation on on-going efforts to develop the ability to generated Tagged PDF output using pdfTeX, in conjuction with other software tools.

In this talk I’ll show how recent improvements to Adobe Reader and Adobe Acrobat Pro software have increased the usefulness of Tagged PDF documents, containing a MathML description of the TeX-typeset mathematical content.

In particular, by careful specification of the words to be “Read Out Loud”, mathematical content can be conveyed quite effectively to the visually impaired.

Also, using Adobe’s Acrobat Pro as the PDF browser, the ability to export to XML means that a fully marked-up, with MathML for the mathematics, version of the PDF document’s contents can be obtained at will from the same file that displays the high-quality typeset visual appearance.

Examples will be shown of diverse mathematical content, generated automatically from standard LaTeX coding, along with suitably generated MathML descriptions.

Frank Mittelbach LATEX3 Project Play (33min) Download: FLV | MOV | OGG | MP3

In The TEXbook Don Knuth poses the following exercise: “Why do you think the author of TEX didn’t make boxes more symmetrical between horizontal and vertical, by allowing reference points to be inside the boundary instead of insisting that the reference point must appear at the left edge of each box?” and gives the following answer: “No applications of such symmetrical boxes to English-language printing were apparent; it seemed pointless to carry extra generality as useless baggage that would rarely if ever be used, merely for the sake of symmetry. In other words, the author wore a computer science cap instead of a mathematician’s mantle on the day that TEX’s boxes were born. Time will tell whether or not this was a fundamental error!”

In this talk we will show how multiple reference points on boxes allow for a completely different approach to design specification and what can be done to successfully overcome the limitations resulting from Don’s cap worn that day.

Hans Hagen and Taco Hoekwater Play (35min) Download: FLV | MOV | OGG | MP3

MetaPost 2.000 is planned for release in the summer of 2010. This presentation is a short report on the project history and current status. MetaPost version 1.500 was released around BachoTEX 2010, and in that release all memory arrays will have been replaced by dynamic memory allocation.

John Hobby Stanford TeX Project Play (28min) Download: FLV | MOV | OGG | MP3

This talk explains the motivation behind boxes.mp and discusses some alternatives. Automatic graph layout can be combined with MetaPost in various ways, but this technology is somewhat hard to control.

Bart Childs College Station, TX Play (33min) Download: FLV | MOV | OGG | MP3

Don Knuth created Literate Programming about thirty years ago. It could be called a methodology, discipline, paradigm, … Bentley’s “Programming Pearls” article about Knuth’s book, TEX: The Program, caused a huge stir in the computing professions. Soon there was announcement of a Literate Programming section for the CACM. There then appeared a number of “Literate Programming systems”.

The use of the term Literate Programming is often applied to systems that have few of the characteristics of Knuth’s WEB. There are at least two systems that are still in use that are quite faithful to the philosophy that Knuth elucidated in his original Pascal based WEB system: CWEB and FWEB. These support at least three languages each. Most other systems are relatively independent of language.

I will propose a definition for Literate Programming that will be used in my comments about some of these systems. I will also discuss some items from my archives (or memory) about this and related subjects. Some come from teaching the freshman year of computer science using literate programming.

I believe that this style of program development is a great contribution to the goal of creating excellent and maintainable programs. I have often wondered how many of the errors that Knuth has rewarded us for would have even been found if the program had been in the style of Unix “pretty printing”. In spite of this, it is referenced too little. I will offer my opinions as to why this tragedy persists, what I/we should have done—based on my humble view from my faulty crystal ball.

Robert Rundell Seattle, WA Play (32min) Download: FLV | MOV | OGG | MP3

(Due to operator error, the speaker video for this talk was not recorded — apologies.)

The Knuth-Plass line-breaking algorithm is one of the many exceptional features of TEX, taking a paragraph of text and converting it to a vertical list of well-proportioned lines. Through glue and penalty markers TEX gives the user almost complete control over the spacing and look of the paragraph.

However, in some instances TEX does not provide the user quite as rich a set of options to control the vertical list as in other areas. In particular, eliminating widow and orphan lines can require inserting forced break points into the text, break points that can only be found from previous passes of TEX. Subsequent changes to the document can require changes to some or all of these manually inserted line or page breaks.

In AML, an experimental typesetting program under development, the Knuth-Plass algorithm is enhanced to find not only the optimal line-break points for a paragraph, but also to give alternate mappings of the paragraph into different numbers of lines (where possible). AML stores these different sets of break points and uses this information, along with natural page break points, to automatically eliminate widow and orphan lines in many cases. Once a bad page break point is detected, AML will backtrack and adjust previous paragraphs to create better page breaks. With far greater memory and processing capabilities than were available at TEX’s creation, multiple pages can be examined and processed before a final page break needs to be finalized, allowing the overall document layout to be improved. The combination of keeping multiple pages and also keeping alternative paragraph linebreaking sets in memory allows AML to automate and improve this aspect of document typesetting.

Jean-luc Doumont Principiae Play (35min) Download: FLV | MOV | OGG | MP3

(Due to operator error, the speaker video for this talk was not recorded — apologies.)

Most AllTeX documents are vertical scrolls: essentially, they place content elements under each other, possibly running the scroll in two columns, but hardly more. With the exception of floats, they basically place items on the page in the order in which these are encountered in the source file: that is, they construct pages by piling up boxes horizontally and vertically, gluing them carefully together to achieve the desired (elastic) spacing.

Effective page design, in contrast, often benefits from a more global approach to the page or spread, one that replaces the scroll paradigm by a true two-dimensional layout. Pages are then usually constructed on an underlying grid, in reference to which the items can be positioned flexibly yet harmoniously. To produce all the documents created by our company (Principiae), I have developed such an approach in TeX. The session will present the ideas behind both grid designs in general and the corresponding TeX macros, and illustrate these ideas with a variety of examples (flyers, brochures, slides, etc.).

Our grid approach works in two steps: first create all the items that will appear on a page or spread (text blocks, illustrations, etc.), then place them in the desired locations on the grid, in any order. In a sense, the macro allow the user to specify, “this block of text goes there, that figure goes here, this title goes there, etc. “Dash not unlike what page layout software allows, but with the infinitely superior accuracy that TeX allows. The macros I created to this end are simple, they have worked well for me for many years now, and the resulting documents very often surprise people (“This was done with TeX?”). The grid approach in TeX is best exemplified with my recent book (sample pages available at http://www.treesmapsandtheorems.com), in which grid alignments are pushed to an extreme, but it is behind all our documents, notably slides.

Mathieu Bourgeois and Roger Villemaire Université du Québec à Montréal Play (35min) Download: FLV | MOV | OGG | MP3

(Due to operator error, the speaker video for this talk was not recorded — apologies.)

We present SDDL, a Structured Diagram Description Language aimed at producing graphical representations for discrete mathematics and computer science. SDDL allows combining graphical objects (circles, lines, arrows, …) and LATEX boxes to produce diagrams representing discrete structures such as graphs, trees, etc.

In SDDL, one adds objects to a canvas in order to produce a drawing. Objects are either basic building blocks such as circles, lines, arrows or even already defined canvas. This allows reusing existing representations by integrating them at various positions in the main canvas. Furthermore, inner objects can always be referred to. It is hence easy to add linking objects, such as lines and arrows, between inner objects.

SDDL uses an object-oriented inspired syntax, using the dot to access attributes, such as specific points (center, corner, etc.), in a natural way. Diagrams are hence constructed by combining existing parts and linking them in various ways.

Our tool is implemented in Java, but, since SDDL offers its own simple syntax, no knowledge of Java is required in order to learn SDDL. The tool translates the SDDL input into Asymptote code and uses the Asymptote engine to produce EPS output.

SDDL is hence a simple and clear language in which one can combine graphical objects and LATEX code in order to produce structured diagrams such as those used in discrete mathematics and computer science.

John Bowman University of Alberta Play (33min) Download: FLV | MOV | OGG | MP3

(Due to operator error, the speaker video for this talk was not recorded — apologies.)

Asymptote is a powerful descriptive vector graphics language for technical drawing recently developed at the University of Alberta. It attempts to do for figures what (LA)TEX does for equations. In contrast to MetaPost, Asymptote features robust floating-point numerics, high-order functions, and a C++/Java-like syntax. It uses the simplex linear programming method to resolve overall size constraints for fixed-sized and scalable objects. Asymptote understands affine transformations and uses complex multiplication to rotate vectors. Labels and equations are typeset with TEX, for professional quality and overall document consistency.

The feature of Asymptote that has caused the greatest excitement in the mathematical typesetting community is the ability to generate and embed inline interactive 3D vector illustrations within PDF files, using Adobe’s highly compressed PRC format, which can describe smooth surfaces and curves without polygonal tessellation. Threedimensional output can also be viewed directly with Asymptote’s native OpenGL-based renderer. Asymptote thus provides the scientific community with a self-contained and powerful TEX-aware facility for generating portable interactive threedimensional vector graphics.

Uwe Ziegenhagen Cologne, Germany Play (24min) Download: FLV | MOV | OGG | MP3

(Due to operator error, the speaker video for this talk was not recorded — apologies.)

R is a sophisticated statistical programming language available on various platforms. Since its initial development in 1992 it has become a major tool for many scientists all over the world. For the integration with LATEX it provides various tools allowing a dynamic creation of reports. In my presentation I am going to present a hands-on demonstration of how to work with R and generate impressive reports using the packages Sweave, xtable and tikzdevice.

Chris Rowley LaTeX3 Project Play (35min) Download: FLV | MOV | OGG | MP3

A brief history of LATEX—with a prediction Not only brief, but very brief and with a lot of personal bias! History with attitude!! Left as unpredictable until the last minute will be both ofthese: What I mean by LATEX; and of course the prediction!

William Hammond SUNY Albany Play (22min) Download: FLV | MOV | OGG | MP3

The mathematical notion of “category” in the context of markup languages raises the idea of widespread use of reliable automatic translations between markup languages.

LATEX profiles, which are dialects of LATEX with a fixed command vocabulary where all macro expansions must be effective in that vocabulary, are suitable domains for defining translations to other profiles and, where sensible, to other markup languages.

The construction of reliable translators from several journal-neutral LATEX profiles to many journal-specific LATEX profiles would eliminate the need for technical editing in the production flow for academic journals.

1. William F. Hammond, “GELLMU: A Bridge for Authors from LATEX to XML”, TUGboat, vol. 22 (2001), no. 3, pp. 204–207; also available online at http://www.tug.org/TUGboat/Contents/ contents22-3.html.
2. William F. Hammond, “Dual presentation with math from one source using GELLMU”, TUGboat, vol. 28 (2007), no. 3, pp. 306–311; also available online at http://www.tug.org/ TUGboat/Contents/contents28-3.html. A video recording of the presentation at TUG 2007, July 2007, in San Diego is available at http://www.river-valley.tv/conferences/tex/tug2007/.
3. William F. Hammond, “Multipurpose LATEX-like markup for math”, talk given in the AMS-MAA Special Session Putting Math on the Web the Correct Way at the Joint Mathematics Meetings in San Diego in January 2008. This has not been published, but HTML slides that link to many examples are available on the web at http://math.albany.edu/math/pers/hammond/Presen/JMM08/Putting/.

Walter Gander ETH Play (21min) Download: FLV | MOV | OGG | MP3

In 1984 I wanted to write a German textbook called Computermathematik using the typesetting system TEX developed by Don Knuth, which I had always admired and which I had been aware of since my first sabbatical year in Stanford in 1977. Mark Kent, a graduate student at Stanford in 1984, pointed out to me that Leslie Lamport had just finished a new typesetting system called LATEX which I might want to use instead. I did, and in Fall 1984 I had finished the (at least I think) first book written in LATEX. In this historical talk I will present some reminiscences how the book was produced.

Didier Verna EPITA / LRDE Play (39min) Download: FLV | MOV | OGG | MP3

Every LATEX user faces the “compatibility nightmare”one day. With so much intercession capabilitiesat hand (LATEX code being able to redefine itself at will), a time comes inevitably when thecompilation of a document fails, due to a class/styleconflict. In an ideal world, class/style conflictsshould only be a concern for package maintainers,not end-users of LATEX. Unfortunately, the world isreal, not ideal, and end-user document compilationdoes break.

As both a class/style maintainer and a documentauthor, I tried several times to come up withsome general principles or a systematic approach tohandling class/style cross-compatibility in a smoothand gentle manner, but I ultimately failed. Instead,one Monday morning, I woke up with this vision ofthe LATEX biotope, an emergent phenomenon whoseglobal behavior cannot be comprehended, becauseit is in fact the result of a myriad of “macro”-interactions between small entities, themselves inperpetual evolution.

In this presentation, I would like to draw bridgesbetween LATEX and biology, by viewing documents,classes and styles as living beings constantlymutating their geneTEX code in order to survive\renewcommand attacks.

Jim Hefferon TUG CTAN Play (27min) Download: FLV | MOV | OGG | MP3

CTAN has many packages that solve many problems, but users can have trouble finding the package that solves the problem that they are having today. We now support text-based searches of the package descriptions. Here we will demonstrate keyword and tree-based characterizations of packages.

Herbert Voß FU-Berlin Play (35min) Download: FLV | MOV | OGG | MP3

There are still several reasons to use the “traditional” way of creating PDF output, namely the sequence LaTeX → DVIPS → PS2PDF. Using pdfLaTeX is onlypossible when the PostScript related code is handled before the pdfLaTeX run. Thus, several packages and/or scripts have been developed which supports EPS images, or general PostScript-relatedcode, in a document which is compiled at least one time with pdfLaTeX:pst-pdf, auto-pst-pdf, pdftricks, epstopdf, pst2pdf, pstools, … All have the same general goal,but each works in a different way. We will demonstrate with severalexamples.

Stephen Hicks Google Inc. Play (27min) Download: FLV | MOV | OGG | MP3

Authors using LaTeX to typeset books with significant margin material often run into the problem of long notes running off the bottom of the page. A typical workaround is to insert vertical shifts by hand, but this is a tedious process that is invalidated when pagination changes. Another workaround is memoir’s sidebar function, but this can be unsatisfying for short textual notes, and standard marginpars cannot be mixed with sidebars. I will discuss a solution I put together to make margin pars “just work” by keeping a list of floating inserts and placing them intelligently in the output routine. Time permitting, I will also discuss some thoughts on improving LaTeX’s float placement specifiers.

Pavneet Arora Play (41min) Download: FLV | MP3

Mathematics worksheet generators abound on the web. Many use static content and focus on graphics and animation in order to package the material in an appealing manner. This approach comes across as a fight for \emph{eyeballs}\Dash all too common when trying to attract the target audience on the Internet. The emphasis on form often displaces the basis of learning at the primary education level, which is simple practise. Beginning with an exploration on effective learning strategies for grade school mathematics the use of \LaTeX{} to generate dynamic mathematics worksheets\Dash lots and lots of them\Dash is discussed.

Boris Veytsman, Leyla Akhmadeeva Play (36min) Download: FLV | MOV | OGG | MP3

The acronym glamp is used to denote a combination of GNU Linux, Apache, MySQL and Perl, Python or PHP, which now is one of the most common technologies for dynamic creation of Web pages [2,6]. In this talk we describe the use of this technology for automatic creation of medical pedigrees [1,3,4,5].

To make the drawing of pedigrees easy for medical professionals, we put TeX and PostScript processing of their input on a Web site (http://pedigree.varphi.com). In this talk we cover both technical aspects of this (integration of TeX with glamp) and the preliminary results of using this site in the education environment.

Kaveh Bazargan River Valley Technologies Play (25min) Download: FLV | MOV | OGG | MP3

Batch Commander is a general graphic user interface for any batch system that runs a text file as a batch job and creates an output. It allows quick manipulation of parameters which it writes to an external config file and which it then uses to show the output. The latest incarnation of the system will be shown, with a live demo.

Jonathan Kew Play (33min) Download: FLV | MOV | OGG | MP3

This presentation introduces TeXworks, a simple TeX environment based on modern standards\Dash including Unicode text encoding, and PDF output by default Dash 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.

First conceived during discussions at the time of TUG’07 in San Diego, TeXworks is now widely available, being included in both TeX Live and MiKTeX for Windows, MacTeX for MacOSX, and in packages for various GNULinux, BSD, and similar systems.

Following the first “stable” release (v0.2) in September 2009, the most significant new feature added to the application is a scripting interface. This allows users to extend and enhance the basic program in several ways, both by adding custom menu commands and by providing “hook” scripts that are automatically run at specific times, such as when a file is opened or after a typesetting run finishes. We will look at examples of how TeXworks can thus be extended using any of several available scripting languages.

The TeX community is invited to participate in the ongoing development of this environment, either at the level of actual code or in any supporting area, such as document templates or interface localization.

Idris Hamid Play (46min) Download: FLV | MOV | OGG | MP3

After years of research, the Oriental TeX Project can proudly announce that it is closing in on the holy grail of paragraph-based Arabic typography. We illustrate this by demonstrating the typesetting of the Qur’an in LuaTeX and ConTeXt MKIV.

Hans Hagen Play (35min) Download: FLV | MOV | OGG | MP3

In the Oriental TeX project we use a combined approach to get nicely typeset paragraphs. We use a font with so many features that it drives font programs crazy but it works out well. We combine that with a special paragraph optimizer that improves the quality using different feature sets. This is a typical example of a local optimization that only kicks in on demand.

In this talk I will show how input is converted into nice looking output and how the already acceptable output can be further improved. I will also show how we visualize the process.

A byproduct of this effort is the TeX pararagraph builder rewritten in Lua. I will discuss a few issues that showed up when converting the original code into Lua and some of the outcomes that will be fed back into the LuaTeX code base.

Hans Hagen Play (37min) Download: FLV | MOV | OGG | MP3

All the time that I’ve been using TEX, I’ve been lucky enough to stumble into a solution just in time to save my day (or some project). In most cases it involved starting from scratch with the strong belief that TEX can do everything. After a while you reach a state where you can predict if something can be done or not.

An extreme example of operating on the edge is backgrounds that span paragraphs and pages, adapt to paragraph characteristics, and can be nested. Another mechanism that made some projects possible was HTML-like table building. Imagine combining these two mechanisms.

Such traditional solutions already benefit a lot from LUATEX for instance because METAPOST is integrated. Although we could stretch TEX’s lifespan in for instance the font arena it is no fun to stay eight bit among the Unicoders and OpenType lovers. But it can get worse. The last couple of years I started running into designers’ demands that simply are not possible in traditional TEX. Especially in automated typesetting you need tricks that are (with good reason) beyond standard TEX engines. Here we need to really adapt or extend the engine to get things done.

In this talk I will show a few examples and solutions. These also show the MKIV approach to solve such nasty problems. I will discuss some experiments with providing LUA based variants of internal functions that we can use in exceptional situations where performance (in terms of speed) is not an issue.

William Cheswick AT&T Shannon Labs Play (38min) Download: FLV | MOV | OGG | MP3

TeX and other traditional text layout markup languages are predicated on the assumption that the final output format would be known to the nanometer. Extensive computation and clever algorithms let us optimize the presentation for a high standard of quality. But ebooks are here. The iPad has sold more than two million units in under three months, and, combined with other book readers, offers a new way to store and read documents. While these readers offer hope to newspapers (and perhaps doom to many physical bookstores), they are an increasing challenge to high quality text layout. Ebook users are accustomed to selecting text size (for aged eyes and varied reading conditions) and reader orientation. We can’t run TeX over a document every time a reader shifts position. Do we precompute and download layouts for various devices, orientations, and text sizes? Do we compromise our standards of quality to use HTML- and XML-based solutions? These are new challenges to the TeX community.

Alan Hoenig Play (27min) Download: FLV | MOV | OGG | MP3

I’ve recently used XeTeX to typeset and maintain a manuscript which develops a mnemonic technique for remembering the meanings for the 2000 most common Chinese characters. Following a brief introduction to this method, I discuss how painless XeTeX makes it to typeset Chinese and English together, and how TeX makes it (relatively) simple to implement this memory method in a handbook such as this. Some concluding comments emphasize aspects that are familiar to old TeX-hands, but may be overlooked by newer users. Because TeX source is ASCII text (or its Unicode extension), it’s easy to manage and maintain the information in these source files in a straightforward way via Perl or any other scripting language. TeX coding often becomes simpler, as it’s possible for Perl to make some decisions (not typesetting ones, to be sure) for you, so your TeX macros have less work to do.

Johannes Küster Typoma Play (43min) Download: FLV | MOV | OGG | MP3

Why have certain symbols and notations gained general acceptance, while others fell into oblivion? And why did mathematicians happily adopt TeX as a standard, while they hardly ever used MF (or other tools) to develop new notations?

In this presentation I will give quality criteria for mathematical symbols. I will show many unknown, little-known or little-used notations, some of which deserve to be much more widely used.

Also I will show new symbols and ideas for new notations, especially for some well known notions which lack a good notation (e.g., gcd and lcm, Stirling numbers, and more).

David Ruddy1, Steve Grathwoh2 1Cornell University Library, 2Duke University Press Play (31min) Download: FLV | MOV | OGG | MP3

Project Euclid, a collaboration between Cornell University Library and Duke University Press, provides an online repository and publishing environment for independent mathematics and statistics journals. We discuss the issues surrounding the online display of mathematics at Project Euclid and, more specifically, the implementation of MathJax, an open-source, Ajax-based math display solution supporting both TeX and MathML notation.

Boris Veytsman George Mason University, Fairfax, VA Play (27min) Download: FLV | MOV | OGG | MP3

Virtual fonts (\vf) were created to address a shortcoming of \TeX{} fonts: each slot address occupied exactly one byte, so there were no more than 256 different characters per font.Later, when
PostScript fonts got popular, \vf{} became the way of choice for
integration of these fonts with \TeX{}~[2,3].Today new font formats (\OTF, \TTF, etc.)\ can be directly read by the modern \TeX{} engines, and, for example, \XeTeX{} can directly work with system fonts.There is a temptation to declare \vf{} obsolete.

In this talk we show that there is much more functionality in \vf{} than just making PostScript fonts available for \TeX.There are various tricks developed over the years, that use \vf{} technology to achieve new striking effects.Some of these tricks are described in Alan Hoenig’s great book [1], and some are used by the author [4].

The aim of this presentation is to convince the users to learn how to employ \vf, and to convince the programmers of the new engines to provide the interface for font manipulation comparable to \vf.

\def\bblfilebasename{vfonts}
\@readbblfile

Will Robertson University of Adelaide, Australia Play (29min) Download: FLV | MOV | OGG | MP3

Over the last few years I’ve been tinkering with Unicode mathematics in XeTeX. In late 2009 I spent a few weeks ironing out the significant bugs and think I’ve got a pretty good handle on the whole system now. In this presentation, I’ll discuss the advantages Unicode maths brings to LaTeX, challenges faced dealing with Unicode, challenges with maths fonts (including the STIX fonts), challenges with compatibility with pkgname{amsmath} and/or MathML, and assorted related remarks. In future plans, I hope to use this system as the basis for equivalent development in LuaTeX as well.

Ross Moore Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia Play (41min) Download: FLV | MOV | OGG | MP3

This talk will be a follow-on to the introduction to “Tagged PDF” given at last year’s TUG meeting. Here I’ll present several examples of tagged PDF documents containing real-world mathematical layouts, which demonstrate the advantages that tagging provides, in terms of long-term Archivability (acro{PDFA}) and Accessibility (acro{PDFUA}) and sharing of content and markup via export to XML.

A script, written in Perl, is under continuing development. This script combines the MathML presentational description of a piece of mathematics with corresponding LaTeX source for its visual appearance, creating a detailed TeX coding using new primitives that are processed by an enhanced version of pdfTeX to produce fully tagged PDF documents. If time permits we can discuss some of the complications that arise due to differences in the way mathematical structures are handled by TeX and for MathML.

This is joint work with Thanh (River Valley Technologies), author of pdfTeX.

Ross Moore Macquarie university, Sydney, Australia Play (45min) Download: FLV | MOV | Ogg | mp3

This talk will demonstrate recent work done by the author and Han The Thanh, to enrich pdfTeX with the primitives to allow the production of “tagged PDF”. As this is still very much work-in-progress, the talk will concentrate on presenting various aspects of tagging that allow the advantages of tagging to be easily appreciated. These advantages include, but are not limited to:

• substitution of Unicode characters, for glyph combinations from fonts that use encodings other than Unicode, via CMap resources and other techniques;
• alternative text, to be read by screen-readers;
• extraction of text from PDFs in XML format;
• extraction of mathematical content, in MathMLformat.

Each of these aspects will be illustrated by examples constructed using an enhanced version of pdfTeX.

Also, I’ll try to explain the extra complexity of internal PDF structures required for generating properly tagged structure and content. If there is sufficient time, this may be followed by a discussion of the requirements needed to adjust the LaTeX format and packages, to facilitate the automatic production of properly tagged PDF, to become conformant with the ISO–32000–2 standard — also known as PDF/UA (Universal Accessibility, http://pdf.editme.com/PDFUA/). This standard includes MathML tagging of mathematical content; I wish to acknowledge Neil Soiffer (Design Science Inc., http://accessiblemath.dessci.com/) for motivation and much helpful advice, and testing, concerning this aspect.

Nelson Beebe University of Utah, USA Play (45min) Download: FLV | MOV | Ogg | mp3

After giving some background and comments on the BIBTeX bibliographic database system, we discuss the problem of searching large collections of such data. We briefly describe how relational databases are structured and queried.

Portable new programs, bibtosql and bibsql, are introduced and their use is illustrated. The first handles the conversion of BIBTeX data to input for three free, popular, and portable, database systems. The second provides a uniform and simple user interface for issuing search queries to any of the supported backend databases.

We finish with a discussion of the contributions of the two late computer scientists to whom this article is dedicated.

Jin-Hwan Cho The University of Suwon, Republic of Korea Play (36min) Download: FLV | MOV | Ogg | mp3

DVIasm is a TeX utility program that is designed for editing DVI les with three steps: disassembling, editing, and assembling.

The rst stage of DVIasm [1] supported the standard DVI file format as in DVItype and DTL, but in a much more exible way than those utilities. In the second stage [2], DVIasm made it possible to handle two-byte characters, CJK and Unicode characters. The extended DVI formats generated by Omega, Japanese pTeX were all supported, as well as ordinary LaTeX packages with subfont scheme such as CJK-LaTeX and Korean ko.TeX. The final stage of DVIasm confronts the two advanced TeX engines, LuaTeX and XeTeX, both of which can handle OpenType and TrueType les in a direct way without TFM files.

In this talk we introduce DVIasm with a few interesting applications to the TeX world, and discuss how DVIasm handles the extended DVI formats generated by LuaTeX and XeTeX.

[1] Jin-Hwan Cho, Hacking DVI les: Birth of DVIasm, The PracTEX Journal (2007), no. 1, and TUGboat 28 (2007), no. 2, 210{217. http://tug.org/TUGboat/Articles/tb28-2/tb89cho.pdf.

[2] Jin-Hwan Cho, Handling Two-Byte Characters with DVIasm, The Asian Journal of TeX 2 (2008), no. 1, 63–68. http://ajt.ktug.kr/assets/2008/5/1/0201cho.pdf.

Frank Quinn Play (30min) Download: FLV | MOV | Ogg | mp3

I’ll describe an NSF-funded project to use TeX to produce self-scoring and otherwise interactive PDF documents for educational use. D.P. Story’s AcroTeX Education Bundle already has a great deal of the necessary functionality and will serve as the starting point.

The objective is to produce customized documents — including tests — that are essentially independent of a testing system or other restricted environment. This is needed to make content more portable and less dependent on specic systems. PDF provides satisfactory functionality for the end product. The missing link is a source format that complies to PDF, complete with forms, links, and embedded JavaScript, and that can be written both by software problem generators and (in principle anyway) humans. An enhancement of TeX seems ideal.

Kaveh Bazargan River Valley Technologies Play (40min) Download: FLV | MOV | Ogg | mp3

An important advantage of ebook readers is their ability to modify text size and page orientation, for the most comfortable reading conguration. The ebook reader has to reformat the text on the fly and with minimum delay. Current ebook readers (e.g. Stanza on the iPhone) can do this reformatting, but cannot deal with complicated text such as mathematics. We have been experimenting with using TeX as the formatting engine. Of course it can handle complex mathematics, but it also creates the best line breaks of any ebook reader, e.g. Stanza. We will report our experiments with using TeX as an ebook reader on the iPhone.

Kaveh Bazargan (MC) River Valley Technologies Play (53min) Download: FLV | MOV

Kaveh had the honor of being the Master of Ceremonies at the banquet, a chance for all to let their hair down and relax.

Joe McCool http://benburb.demon.co.uk Play (45min) Download: FLV | MOV | Ogg | mp3

The author is an active Irish traditional musician. He is also a keen inland boater. He is having a lot of fun composing a book on “Traditional Music for Boaters”.

In this paper he describes his successes and frustrations using Lilypond, Lilypond-book, LaTeX, and ABC musical notation. Lilypond and LaTeX have a lot in common. Neither are WYSIWYG, neither demand GUIs. Both compile simple flat files to produce beautiful graphical output.

Lilypond’s original manifestations produced output directly for LaTeX, but of late users writing books have been encouraged to use Lilypond-book. This looks for Lilypond code within LaTeX source files and produces graphics and associated instructions which can then be processed by LaTeX.

Most joy has been gained from automating these processes under Linux and Perl.

Jean–Michel Hufflen University of Franche–Comté, France Play (30min) Download: FLV | MOV | Ogg | mp3

BibTeX is the most used bibliography processor in conjunction with LaTeX. To put bibliography styles in action, it uses a stack–based language written with postfixed notations. Recently, other approaches have been proposed: some use a programming language for designing bibliography styles, e.g., Perl in Bibulus; some are based on converters to xml TeXts and use xslt for bibliography styles; a recent proposal—the biblaTeX package—consists of using LaTeX command to control the layout of generated references… We propose a comparative study of these approaches and show which programming styles are encouraged, from a point of view related to methodology. Finally, we explain how this study has influenced the design of MlBibTeX, our multi–lingual reimplementation of BibTeX.

Boris Veytsman George Mason University, Fairfax Play (22min) Download: FLV | MOV | Ogg | mp3

Several years ago the author was tempted by extremely cheap rates for TUGboat advertisements, and declared urbi et orbi he was a TeX consultant. This audacious step lead to many interesting experiences. Some results of this work were published on CTAN and listed at http://borisv.lk.net/laTeX.html (the list includes both commissioned packages and the ones I wrote for my own purposes).

In this talk I tell about my past projects, big and small, and discuss the lessons learned from my journeys in the fascinating world of publishers, editors and authors. I describe writing book and journal styles, communication with customers and other issues relevant for TeX consulting.