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.