Frank Mittelbach LaTeX Project Play (40min) Download: FLV | MOV | Ogg | mp3

Looking back at twenty–odd years involvement in LaTeX development and maintenance the author highlights the (in his opinion) most important milestones and pitfalls.

• What are significant events that came at the right moment?
• Which important events came at the wrong moment?
• What were the biggest failures and why?

From this data the article attempts to draw conclusions as to how the future of LaTeX could be shaped in a way beneficial to everybody involved and what needs to happen to make this possible.

Steve Peter Pragmatic Programmers Play (30min) Download: FLV | MOV | Ogg | mp3

In this talk, we present the toolchain used to produce the award-winning Pragmatic Bookshelf titles and examine some of the pleasures and pitfalls encountered using TeX, XML, XSLT, Ruby and other open technologies.

Niall Mansfield England Play (21min) Download: FLV | MOV | Ogg | mp3

We recently started re–using LaTeX for large documents — professional computing books. Years ago (1987) I had personally used a LaTeX 2.09 custom class (although it wasn’t called a class file then) for a book I was writing. The class file was written by a colleague, because I found it impossible to understand the low–level TeX mechanisms needed then.In 2006 I wanted to use this class for a new book of my own, and also as the basis for all our camera–ready books submitted by other authors.I had the choice of converting it to a new .cls file, which much of the documentation suggests is the thing to do, or writing “add–on” .sty file for the standard book.cls. We decided to try the .sty approach, as there were several packages that seemed to do most of what we wanted.

We found that the .sty approach was straightforward, and much easier than expected. The resulting style is much shorter, easier to understand and maintain, and is much more flexible than our old one — we can use most standard packages to add extra features with no effort, because we still provide all the hooks that add–on packages rely on.

Our paper works through what we did as a case study, highlighting the bad bits as well as the good bits, so others can use it as a guide. The hardest thing was coming to grips with LaTeX hooks, its sectioning mechanism, and how the two interact; we had to document these, and we include that rudimentary documentation in our paper. Fortunately and surprisingly, little of this documentation work was required.

Had we tried to do this work as a new .cls file, we would have failed miserably, and would probably have ended up using InDesign or Quark Express for typesetting instead of LaTeX.

Krisztián Pócza Budapest, Hungary Play (30min) Download: FLV | MOV | Ogg | mp3

Docx2tex is a small command line tool that uses standard technologies to help users of Word 2007 to publish publications where typography is relevant or only papers produced by TeX are accepted. Behind the scenes, docx2tex uses common technologies to interpret Word 2007 OOXML format without utilizing the API of Word 2007. Docx2tex is planned to be published as a free open source utility that is accessible and extensible by everyone. This paper has been originally written in Word 2007 and then converted to TeX using docx2tex.

Jonathan Kew SIL International Play (31min) Download: FLV | MOV | Ogg | 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 occasional user.

Besides the relatively “clean” interface, the second major factor in TeXShop’s success is probably its PDF–centric workflow, with pdfTeX as the default typesetting engine. PDF is today’s 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 developed by Jérôme Laurens for pdfTeX and XeTeX, and shipping in TeX Live 2008. This provides 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, bringing a new level of convenience to source/preview navigation. 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 initial release.

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

Manjusha Joshi Pune, India Play (20min) Download: FLV | MOV | Ogg | mp3

Now a days most of the journals accepts TeX files from authors. Journals submits pdf files of the article or abstract of the article on the web site.

User wants to search for typical word, concept in the repository. Is it possible to faster the search because of availability of the TeX files? Since TeX files are structured documents. We can extract most of the important words from the document and make it available to user in forms of groups of related words. This will make user to search faster and get the required document in minimum time.

Taco Hoekwater Play (24min) Download: FLV | MOV | Ogg | mp3

The first stage of the MPlib project has resulted in a library that can be used in for instance LuaTeX, and is also the core of the MetaPost program itself. This talk will present the current state of affairs, the conversion process (from pascal to c), and the interface. A roadmap towards MegaPost will be presented too.

Hans Hagen Play (32min) Download: FLV | MOV | Ogg | mp3

This talk discusses the way MPlib is integrated in the next generation of ConTeXt, tagged MkIV. The presentation will focus on the different aspects of integration as well as performance. The impact on workflows where heavy use is made of MetaPost integration will be discussed.

Mojca Miklavec*, Arthur Reutenauer** * University of Ljubljana, ** GUTenberg, France Play (26min) Download: FLV | MOV | Ogg | mp3

In the TeX world, the name of Cork is associated with a standardization effort dating back to 1990, the Cork font encoding, which can be used for most European languages written in the Latin script. At about the same time, though, a much wider standardization effort was initiated, as the Unicode Consortium was created to devise a universal character set suitable for any language and writing system. Of course, it wasn’t long before people felt the need to support Unicode in TeX–like systems.

How far are we today? The latest extensions to the TeX engine are all labelled as “supporting Unicode”, but upon closer inspection this reveals rather imprecise: does it mean enabling UTF–8 input, handling multibyte characters, or implementing all the Unicode character properties and algorithms?

In the framework of Google Summer of Code, one of us (Arthur) is sponsored to improve Unicode support in TeX. The original accepted proposal was about three aspects: combining characters, bidirectional algorithm and line–breaking properties, and I will be working on LuaTeX and XeTeX, who both handle multibyte characters and UTF–8 characters natively.

Combining characters are Unicode’s diacritical marks: you put them after a character (called “base character”) to add an accent to it. This is very similar to TeX’s accent primitive, except that they come after the character they apply to, and that you can stack them. There are also equivalences between sequences containing combining characters and precomposed characters, and algorithms to transform them (called normalization).

The bidirectional algorithm (“bidi” for short) specifies how to handle TeXt mixing characters from writing systems with different directions, for example, English and Arabic.

Finally, Unicode characters have properties pertaining to line breaks: for example, characters like NBSP forbid breaks after them (very much like TeX’s “tie”); other allow break under certain conditions, etc.

Those three aspects were chosen because it was felt they all related to capabilities that TeX had from the beginning and that they were, therefore, among the most interesting aspects of Unicode with respect to TeX processing.

In the mean time, Mojca has initiated an effort to convert TeX Live’s hyphenation patterns to UTF–8. The challenge here is to integrate the current pattern files in a way that they can be used with both 8–bit engines (TeX, pdfTeX), and engines supporting native UTF–8 input (LuaTeX, XeTeX). It has uncovered interesting issues of the relationship between TeX and Unicode: it helps us understand to which extent, and how, TeX input can be converted to Unicode, and vice–versa.

Joachim Schrod Kranichweg 1, Germany Play (27min) Download: FLV | MOV | Ogg | mp3

xindy is an index processor. Just like MakeIndex, it transforms raw index information into a sorted index, made available as document text with markup that may be processed by TeX to produce typeset book indexes. Unlike MakeIndex, it is multi–lingual and supports UTF–8 encoding, both in the raw index input and in the tagged document output.

xindy draws its strengths from five key features.

1. Internationalization is the most important feature point and was originally xindy’s raison d’être: with the standard distribution, xindy knows how to handle 53 languages and dialects correctly out of the box.
2. Markup normalization and encoding support is the ability to handle markup in the index keys in a transparent and consistent way, as well as different encodings. Predefined encodings are not only UTF–8 to support XeTeX, also supported is LICR, the encoding that’s output by standard LaTeX to its raw index files, and TeX/Omega’s low–level output of (Unicode) characters.
3. Modular configuration enables the reusability of index configurations. For standard indexing tasks, LaTeX users do not have to do much except to use available modules.
4. Location references go beyond page numbers. An index entry points to a location in the main text. While most index processors can work only with numbers, xindy features a generalized notion of location references that can be book names, law paragraphs, URLs and other references.
5. Highly configurable markup is another cornerstone. While this is usually not as important for LaTeX users, it comes in handy if one works with other author systems besides TeX.

While development of xindy has been dormant for quite some time, the last few months saw a flurry of renewed energy and new work to get xindy in the hand of its potential users. The distribution has been streamlined and is now available in standardized source form, thus paving the road for a future acceptance into TeX–Live.

In addition, TUG2008 at Cork is the perfect avenue to present xindy’s TUG30 release, that will feature for the first time full support for Linux/Unix, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows and also straight–forward and simple installation possibilities, both as binary and source distribution.

Ulrik Vieth Germany Play (31min) Download: FLV | MOV | Ogg | mp3

The city of Cork has become well–known in the TeX community, ever since it gave name to an encoding developed at the European TeX conference of 1990. The Cork encoding, as it became known, was the first example of an 8–bit text font encoding that appeared after the release of TeX 3.0, which was later followed by a number of other encodings based on similar design principles.

As of today, the Cork encoding represents one of several possible choices of 8–bit subsets from a much larger repertoire of glyphs provided in font projects such as Latin Modern or TeX Gyre. Moreover, recent developments of new TeX engines are making it possible to take advantage of OpenType font technology directly, largely eliminating the need for 8–bit font encodings altogether.

During all the time since 1990, math fonts have always been lagging behind the developments in text fonts. While the need for new math font encodings was recognized early on and while several encoding proposals have been discussed, none of them ever reached production quality and became widely used.

In this paper, we want to review the situation of math font encodings as of 2008, especially in view of recent developments of Unicode math fonts such as the STIX fonts or CambriaMath. In particular, we try to answer the question whether a Cork math font encoding is still needed to make use of such fonts in TeX or whether Unicode and OpenType font technology might eventually eliminate the need for TeX–specific math font encodings.

Daniel Rhatigan The University of Reading Play (35min) Download: FLV | MOV | Ogg | mp3

This paper examines the issues involved in the design of typefaces for mathematics. After a brief discussion of some of the typographic and technical requirements of maths composition, three case studies in the development of maths types are presented: Times 4–line Mathematics Series 569, a complement to the Times New Roman text types as set with Monotype equipment; AMS Euler, an experimental design intended to contrast against non–mathematical typefaces set with TeX; and Cambria Math, designed in concert with a new text face to take advantage of new Microsoft solutions for screen display and maths composition.

In all three cases, the typefaces were created to show the capabilities of new technological solutions for setting maths. The technical advances inherent in each font are shown to be as central to its function as its visual characteristics.

By looking at each typeface and technology in turn, and then comparing and contrasting the issues that are addressed in ! each case, it becomes apparent that even though certain challenges are overcome with technical advances, the need to consider the specific behaviours oftype in a maths setting remains constant.

Johannes Küster typoma GmbH Play (29min) Download: FLV | MOV | Ogg | mp3

“Minion Math” is a set of mathematical fonts I have developed over the past 6 years. Designed as an add–on package to the Adobe MinionPro fonts, it consists of 20 OpenType fonts (4 weights, times 5 optical sizes). In future releases it will cover the complete Unicode math symbols, and more.

In the design I tried to avoid all flaws and shortcomings of other math fonts, with the aim of creating the most comprehensive and versatile set of math fonts to date.

In this presentation, I will talk about the design principles for Minion Math, and the design decisions I took. I will also show many samples of the fonts and will compare them to other math fonts as well.

Karel Píška Prague, Czech Republic Play (25min) Download: FLV | MOV | Ogg | mp3

The cuneiform font collection covers the Basic Latin (ASCII) block and glyph subsets for Akkadian, Ugaritic and Old Persian with current total number about 600 cuneiform signs. An extension for other languages is planned (Neo–Babylonian, Hittite, etc.). All cuneiform sign forms visually correspond to uniform “Neo–Assyrian” shapes.

Fonts are produced in two steps. With METATYPE1, the package developed by the authors of the Latin Modern and TeXGyre fonts, we can generate hundreds (or thousands) glyphs to assembly a Type 1 font with many glyphs, but with no predefined encoding. The older variant of the cuneiform font collection, made 10 years ago, consists of several separate Type 1 components. A relative small number of mostly simple and repetitive elements is described by METAPOST macros in three variants.

In the second step we construct OpenType using FontForge, the free font editor, created by George Williams. Cubic and quadratic approximation of outline curves are allowed because of a simple design of cuneiform wedges. Therefore both TTF flavored and PostScript (CFF) flavored formats may be generated. We use

FontForge scripting facilities, it is also possible to write commands in its internal textual format (SFD), directly or with some pseudo-automatic tools.
Unfortunately, the glyph repertoire does not correspond to Unicode because more than 300 glyphs do not have their Unicode numbers, and, on the other hand, my fonts covers only about 20% of the Unicode Sumerian–Akkadian cuneiform range (cuneiform signs and numeric signs). The paper describes cuneiform design and a process of font development.

Ameer M. Sherif, Hossam A. H. Fahmy Cairo University, Egypt Play (36min) Download: FLV | MOV | Ogg | mp3

In this paper we discuss in detail how parameterized Arabic letters are metadesigned using METAFONT and then used in forming words. Parameterized Arabic fonts enable greater flexibility in joining glyphs together, rendering words with imperceptible junctions and smoother letter extensions. This work aims at producing written Arabic with quality close to that of calligraphers. Words produced using our parameterized font are compared to other widely used fonts in a subjective test and results are presented.

Stanislav Šarman Clausthal University of Technology, Germany Play (30min) Download: FLV | MOV | Ogg | mp3

We present an on–line system, which tries to convert English text into Gregg shorthand(O’Kennedy, 1990), phonetic pen writing system used in the U.S. and Ireland.

The given text is at first tokenized (tokens being punctuation marks, words and common phrases). For each of the tokens a METAFONT glyph is generated on–the–fly. These glyphs are (smooth) combinations of shorthand graphems corresponding to phonems obtained from a pronunciation lexicon (Fitt, 2006). The shorthand text is then set with LaTeX.

Dave Crossland University of Reading, UK Play (18min) Download: FLV | MOV | Ogg | mp3

“There are three kinds of people: Those that can count, and those that can’t.”

METAFONT is an algebraic programming language for describing the shapes of letters, designed and implemented by Knuth as part of the original TeX typesetting system. It was one of the earliest digital type design systems, and is completely capable of dealing with the letters of any writing system, has always been freely available, and is remarkably powerful. Yet it never caught on with type designers.

The idea of software freedom has not caught on with many type designers either. Although the free software movement has produced a massive amount of high quality programs, there are few fonts and fewer original type designs although there are some, with many available on CTAN.

Psychologists since Jung have suggested that human personality can be classified into ‘types.’ In “Please Understand Me II” David Keirsey relates 20th century theories of personality to the four humours proposed by Hippocrates and personified by the Greek gods Dionysus, Apollo, Prometheus, and Epimethius.

Do type designers tend to be of a certain humour? Is the inherently abstract METAFONT approach of describing shapes with algebra, or the rational appeal of software freedom, unintuitive for that temperament? Are people who do find free software and algebra intuitive involved in type design?

This presentation introduces the discipline of type design, reviews some of the fonts currently distributed in CTAN and explains their various origins. It draws attention to how they have been developed: The stroke — based METAFONT approach, involving writing source code, is starkly different to the typical outline — based ‘Fontographer’ approach, where letter shapes are visually and interactively designed. It suggests the technical benefits and drawbacks of each approach, and why some people prefer one approach over another.

Finally, it covers some tips and tricks for those contributing more free fonts to the TeX world, including some of the legal issues, where and how to source revivals, how to create new designs, and finally, how METAFONT might be modernised in a hybrid stroke/outline system to suit every personality.

Dave Crossland is an international public speaker on software freedom and fonts, runs a small business doing type design, information design and free software consultancy projects, and is a member of the UKTUG Committee. He is currently undertaking the MA Typeface Design programme at the University of Reading’s Department of Typography.

John Plaice The University of New South Wales, Australia Play (25min) Download: FLV | MOV | Ogg | mp3

The Unicode model of text makes a clear distinction between character and glyph, and in so doing, paradoxically, creates the impression that the ultimate representation for text is some form of abstraction from its visual presentation. However,the level of abstraction for different languages encoded “naturally” in Unicode is quite different.

We propose instead that text be encoded as sequences of context–tagged indices into arbitrary indexed structures, including not just character sets such as Unicode, but also dictionaries of words or compound words. Furthermore, these sequences need not necessarily contain elements from the same indexed structures.

Using our approach allows natural solutions for a wide range of problems, including the creation of documents that can be printed using several alternate spellings, the automatic generation of error messages with arguments, and the correct generation of nouns or adjectives with number, case or gender markers or of verb conjugations.

Blanca Mancilla The University of New South Wales, Australia Play (14min) Download: FLV | MOV | Ogg | mp3

We present a general model for electronic documents supporting parallel containers of content, tied together through link components. This model is usable for a wide range of documents, including simple textual documents with footnotes and floats, complex critical editions with multiple levels of footnotes and critical apparatus, maps with multiple layers of visual presentation, and music scores.

This model is inspired from the C++ Standard Template Library, whose basis is that Containers + Iterators + Algorithms = Programs. In our approach, the “iterators” are pointers into the parallel containers, keeping track of callouts for notes, floats, and parallel links.

The data structures required for this model are remarkably simple, and will allow the rapid development of many different kinds of algorithms.

Toby Rahilly The University of New South Wales, Australia Play (24min) Download: FLV | MOV | Ogg | mp3

We present the general mechanism by which logical content, arranged in multiple interacting containers, can be typeset into a set of visual substrates. The overall algorithm is iterative, with the successive iterations refining a multi–dimensional context that parameterises the behavior of the algorithm.

Each iteration consists of three parts. First, each visual substrate is informed which parts of which logical containers are to be placed thereon. Second, in parallel, the content placed in the substrates is typeset. Third, the resulting layout in each substrate is assessed for goodness, thereby resulting in the refinement to the overall context.

In the talk, we will present the theory and the practice behind this algorithm.

Manjusha S. Joshi Pune, India Play (25min) Download: FLV | MOV | Ogg | mp3

There are software with the help of which we can draw diagrams easily. However, there may be some things missing in it, like angle marks, arrows in between vertices etc. Being LaTeX user we also wish to use LaTeX math mode to label diagrams, for that one may require to edit the diagram.

Now–a–days, many figure drawing tools has option of exporting file in PSTricks. Which then generates, PSTricks code for the figure, in a simple LaTeX format. Which is readable and editable. It makes the job easy and efficient.

Boris Veytsman*, Leila Akhmadeeva** * George Mason University, Fairfax, ** Russia Play (42min) Download: FLV | MOV | Ogg | mp3

A medical pedigree is an important tool for researchers, clinicians, students and patients. It helps to diagnose many hereditary diseases, estimate risks for family members, etc (Bennett, Steinhaus, Uhrich, O’Sullivan, Resta, Lochner–Doyle, Markei, Vincent, and Hamanishi, 1995). Recently we reported a comprehensive package for automatic pedigree drawing (Veytsman and Akhmadeeva, 2006; Veytsman and Akhmadeeva, 2007). Since then we extended the algorithm for a number of complex cases, including correct drawing of consanguinic relationships, twins and many others.

In this talk we review the facilities of the current version of the program and the new challenges in computer–aided drawing of medical pedigrees.

We try to make the talk interesting to TeXnicians and TeXperts by discussing the experience of design a TeX–based application working in a “real world”.

Jonathan Fine LTS Strategic, The Open University Play (22min) Download: FLV | MOV | Ogg | mp3

In 2006/7 I developed and set up the public MathTran web service www.mathtran.org. This was done with funding from JISC and the Open University. It provides translation of TeX–notation formulas into high–quality bitmaps. In April 2008 it served 48,000 images a day for a growing range of sites. After tuning, the server could provide about 2 million images a day. It takes about 10 milliseconds to process a small formula.

MathTran images contain rich metadata, including the TeX source for the image and the dvi and log outputs due to that source. This makes it straightforward to edit and resize such images, or convert them to another format, such as SVG or PostScript.

MathTran, used with JavaScript, makes it considerably easier to put mathematics on a web page. In particular, the author of the page does not need to install any special software, and does not have to store thousands of image files.

The MathTran project is now focussed on the authoring of mathematical content. It has produced a prototype instant preview document editor. Funded by the 2008 Google Summer of Code, Christoph Hafemeister is developing JavaScript to provide autocompletion for commands and analysis of TeX errors, all integrated with an online help system embedded in the web page. Separate work is focussed on developing MathTran plugins for WYSIWYG editor web–page components.

This talk will present progress and prospects. It will also discuss some of the broader implications for the TeX community and software, such as

• People using TeX without installing TeX on their machine.
• Help components for web pages.
• Integration with third–party products.
• Standards for TeX–notation mathematics.
• Learning and teaching TeX.

Morten Høgholm LaTeX Project Play (22min) Download: FLV | MOV | Ogg | mp3

TeX has a well–deserved good reputation for its line breaking algorithm and it has found its way into other software over the years. When it comes to interparagraph material such as penalties, skips and whatsits, things start getting murky as TeX provides little help in this area, especially on the main vertical list where most of the action is.

This article describes the galley module which seeks to control line breaking as well as taking care of inter-paragraph material being added at the right time. In other words, galley can assist packages such as breqn which has to construct paragraph shapes on the fly while taking current ones into account as well as ensuring the output routine doesn’t get tricked by penalties, skips and whatsits appearing in places where they could allow breakpoints where none are intended.

Ross Moore Sydney, Australia Play (26min) Download: FLV | MOV | Ogg | mp3

Increasingly mathematical, scientific and technical information is being distributed by electronic means, but having a high–quality paper printout remains important. I will show examples of techniques that are available for having both high–quality typesetting, in particular of mathematics, as well as useful navigation features and text–extraction within electronic documents.

For HTML, some examples will be shown of the use of jsMath within webpages for mathematics journals and for conference abstracts. With PDF, as well as the usual bookmarks and internal hyperlinks for cross–references and citations, advanced features include: (i) Metadata attachments; (ii) copy/paste and searching for mathematical symbols or the underlying TeX coding; (iii) popup images of (floating) figures and tables; (iv) mathematical symbols within bookmarks; (v) bookmarks for cross-referenced locations.

A further feature, particularly useful with mathematics papers, is the ability to make batched searches of the American Math. Society’s MathSciNet database, allowing hyperlinks to be generated for most bibliography entries.

Jérôme LAURENS Université de Bourgogne, France Play (25min) Download: FLV | MOV | Ogg | mp3

In this presentation, we will focus on SyncTeX, a new synchronization technology now embedded into all the major TeX engines available in TeX–Live. This new design is extremely efficient and strong, such that old packages like pdfsync and srcltx, are now completely outdated. But this is not the only advantage: SyncTeX also brings pdf synchronization to the whole Unix world.

Taco Hoekwater Play (26min) Download: FLV | MOV | Ogg | mp3

At TUG 2007 in San Diego, the first beta version of LuaTeX was presented. This year the team presents a version where significant parts of the TeX–Lua api are stable. This talk will give an overview of the components that make up LuaTeX: what libraries do we have and what callbacks are available. The team has some ideas about the next stages of development and these will be presented as well.

Hartmut Henkel Schwetzingen, Germany Play (35min) Download: FLV | MOV | Ogg | mp3

The Lua language allows to define new variable types, and LuaTeX uses this concept for new types like ‘node’ and ‘font’. In this talk an image library as part of the LuaTeX engine is presented, which is built around a new ‘image’ type, giving extended image handling and embedding capabilities. The image primitives inherited from pdfTeX are still fully functional for compatibility.

First the process of image embedding and its limitations using the pdfTeX primitives is described. Then, after a short introduction about Lua libraries, the ‘image’ type of LuaTeX is presented together with the set of new Lua functions for image handling, and their use is illustrated by examples. As work is still ongoing, possible future extensions are discussed as well.

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.

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.

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.