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.

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.

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

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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/.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.