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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is wanted:

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

More details…

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

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

Hans Hagen*, Taco Hoekwater** * Hasselt, The Netherlands, ** Elvenkind B.V., The Netherlands Play (51min) Download: FLV | MOV | mp3

Later this year we will publish the first formal release of LuaTeX. In this presentation we will give an overview of what we have reached so far, what is under construction, and what we are aiming at on the long term.

Jean-Michel Hufflen Besançon, France Play (24min) Download: FLV | MOV | mp3

In order to extend MlBibTeX to languages of the Far East, we are experiencing TeX engines for them — e.g., pTeX — after attending the 1st Asian TeX conference. We propose a demonstration of that.

Marek Ryćko Warszawa, Poland Play (11min) Download: FLV | MOV | mp3

Software designer’s thoughts on using TeX in various applications.

Karel Píška Prague, Czech Republic Play (43min) Download: FLV | MOV | mp3

The contribution presents the results of verification of previous and newest versions of the TeX Gyre fonts, shows examples of various testing techniques, overviews suggestions and bugs; many of them, reported earlier, have already been fixed in the recent releases. “Synoptic tables” have been produced to list a full glyph repertoire to check it for correctness of shapes, completeness, consistency between regular, bold, italic, and bold italic faces, etc. We will also discuss the status and the future of the Cyrillic and Greek parts.

Arthur Reutenauer Paris, France Play (11min) Download: FLV | MOV | mp3

If you look carefully at the well–known TeX logo in Computer Modern at 10pt, you will see something strange (but you may have to magnify it a lot): the lower serif of the E extends slightly of the lower left serif of the X whereas it should only touch it. This phenomenon is even clearer with the version of the logo used in the TUGboat which is somewhat different.

In a sequel to Grzegorz Murzynowski’s talk at EuroBachoTeX 2007 (“LaTeX vs. LaTeX: a modification of The Logo”) who explained how to move the A in the LaTeX logo to give it a better appearance, I would like to discuss options to modify the “TeX” part, and also place it in a historical perspective by tracing its evolution from the beginning.

[Here is an illustration of the problem]

Reinhard Kotucha*, Siep Kroonenberg**, Norbert Preining† * Barsinghausen, Germany, ** Groningen, The Netherlands, † Wien, Austria Play (59min) Download: FLV | MOV | mp3

TeX Live has a new package infrastructure, primarily developed by Norbert Preining, and inspired by the Debian/Linux packaging system.

We shall present a new TeX Live installer, based on the new package infrastructure. It includes a text based as well a graphical user interface. Among other new features, installing TeX Live from the internet is now possible. It should work on all platforms supported by TeX Live.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Kaveh Bazargan River Valley Technologies Play (8min) Download: FLV | MOV | OGG | MP3

This page is for people who have expressed an interest in our work on e-books.

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.

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.

Kaveh Bazargan River Valley Technologies Play (26min) Download: FLV | MOV | OGV | MP3

Publishers are scratching their heads trying to decide which format to use for their eBooks. Here we would like to propose that the correct way to go is to have one open specification for the format, namely ePub. With a little effort, this can be rendered to any other format by the eBook reader.

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.

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.

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.