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+\centerline{\bf TUG10 \& \TeX89: edited highlights}
+\smallskip
+\noindent
+With big meetings like these it is difficult to provide a
+blow by blow account of all the papers. In any case, the
+proceedings of both meetings are (or will be) available
+shortly. The proceedings of TUG10 are available as
+\TUGboat\ 10(4), and \TeX89 should be out ``{\it real
+soon}''. \TeX89 had one or two unscheduled additions, but
+these too may turn up in the proceedings.
+\smallskip
+\leftline{\sl TUG10}
+\leftline{\sl Stanford University, August
+20--23rd} 
+\noindent
+TUG10 was easily the biggest TUG meeting ever held --
+hardly surprising when it was an anniversary meeting, at
+Stanford, and with Don Knuth in attendance. Kodak ought
+to have subsidised the meeting. The clicking of cameras
+was a familiar background noise to Don's every
+public movement. There was a good European turnout, which
+may have contributed to the remarkable change of heart
+experienced by \DeK. After five years of stability, \TeX\
+is to change. It is difficult to know just what went on
+to convince Don of the need for this -- after all, there
+have been repeated suggestions made over the last ten
+years  for changes (some of which surfaced in
+\TeX82), but two factors are known. The first was \DeK's
+trip to Norway a year or so ago, where he experienced at
+first hand a few of the problems created by `foreign'
+languages, and visited on \TeX; the second major factor
+must be the duo of Roswitha Graham and Jan Michael
+Rynning, who spend a {\it lot\/} of time with Don very
+early on in the meeting. The essence of their argument is
+presented elsewhere in \TeXline. I have my suspicion
+that personality played a role, as well as argument.
+Fortunately \DeK\ did not agree to wholescale changes
+(`creeping featurism' as he later described it). The
+majority of the changes are designed to enhance \TeX's
+multilingual capability, although some concessions were
+made to make the job of page makeup a hint or two easier
+(or even `a hint or two less difficult'!).
+The details of these changes are in \TUGboat\ 10(3).
+
+In addition to these changes to \TeX, \LaTeX\ seems set
+to change too, although in not particularly radical ways.
+The initiative to embark on this particular evolution seems
+largely due to Frank Mittelbach and Rainer Sch\"opf (who
+seem to write most of \TUGboat\ these days). Frank won
+the Knuth scholarship for his work on \LaTeX.
+
+Since it was an anniversary meeting, everyone was there
+-- well, not quite true, but it was possible to verify
+that the following existed: Mike Spivak, Leslie Lamport,
+Jill Knuth, Max D\'\i az, Arthur Keller, David Fuchs,
+Neenie Billawalla\dots -- many of the names that you see
+hidden somewhere in an essential Stanford report on
+some aspect of \TeX ware. A rogues gallery might have
+saved the rest of us the discomfort of peering at
+badges and saying `Oh, so you're\dots'. Of course they
+all thought I was Malcolm {\it Brown}, so they thought I
+had done a grand job and were pleased to see me too (for
+the email-deficient, Malcolm Brown started the {\tt
+texhax} listings in their present form).
+
+Stanford is a very pleasant campus, although the grass is
+very noisily cut and trimmed. The building in which the
+conference took place is now propped up after the
+earthquake, although still intact. It has a covered area
+around it which made it possible to have registration and
+administrative details dealt with just outside, although
+under cover. The crazy Brits who had never seen sun
+before were all doing their No\"el Coward `heat of the mid
+day sun' impersonations during the breaks.
+
+There was also an exhibition room with various \TeX ware
+distributors and developers. Phil Taylor claims that
+Kinch was giving Turbo\TeX\ away, but this must have only
+been to selected attendees -- I didn't see it. One of the
+highlights might have been a laser printer which
+understands \dvi, but it was held up in customs. By now
+it may be at TUG headquarters in Providence.
+
+If I have a criticism of the meeting, it was with the
+difficulty in fitting in impromptu meetings: practically
+every hour was packed with eating, conferencing,
+partying, socialising\dots\ My lunch times were further
+occupied with TUG Board meetings. Ah, the Board meetings.
+Catapulted into one of these it is difficult to get a
+grasp of what is really going on. Most of the Board are
+appointees (I started out as a European coordinator
+appointee, but now I'm a member by virtue of being
+Chairman of uk\TeX ug -- the UK \TeX\ Users Group). I'm a
+bit wary about this appointee stuff: it's not really the
+weft from which democracy was woven, but as a
+representative of `mad King George' in the land of the
+free, it's not really my place to educate them about
+democracy, is it? On the other hand, if the French
+haven't excellent credentials in this area, who have? Go
+to it Bernard Gaulle! (President of GUTenberg, and now
+also a Board member). Back to my criticism: it really was
+quite difficult to manage other informal meetings
+unless you were prepared to schedule time after
+midnight or before breakfast (same thing I
+suppose). Some `bird's of a feather' meetings did get of
+the ground towards the end of the conference. 
+
+During the conference we `elected' a new President
+(Nelson Beebe) and Secretary (Cal Jackson). I hadn't
+realised the extent to which electoral systems differed.
+We English speakers have this illusion that just because
+we can communicate with Americans without too much
+confusion, and because their pol\-itical system grew out of
+the 18th century English system, that we're basically
+similar. Wrong. When we're described
+as `aliens' we should reflect on it and realise that we
+are indeed on  another planet. There is no point
+trying to understand US electoral systems from a European
+stance. 
+
+Although I won't mention every paper, one or two stand
+out for one reason or another: \DeK's paper on the
+`Errors of \TeX' was scheduled for about three hours.
+That in itself would have been memorable. It was actually
+a very entertaining and stimulating paper which
+catalogued all the errors which \DeK\ had encountered in
+the writing and testing of \TeX. He had categorised them
+and began to draw inferences on the whole subject of
+programming. On this evidence, `zero defect' software
+doesn't seem very likely. Even Knuth repeated some errors.
+What chance do the rest of us have?
+
+There were good papers and not so good papers -- but the
+quality is not the sole yardstick. Presenting papers
+serves to identify people and is an essential part of the
+communication process. Perhaps the format of the TUG
+meeting discourages the little `isn't this interesting'
+paper -- the ones I tend to find most useful -- and
+focusses on `standard-length' papers: this often means
+spinning out material beyond its breaking point. 
+
+There was one notable innovation -- the inclusion of an
+extra half day on \MF, at the beginning of the
+conference. Doug Henderson's `Introduction to \MF' was
+amazing as he discovered the supreme difficulty of giving
+a live demo to an audience much larger than anticipated.
+
+As the papers will show, \TeX\ continues to expand into
+new areas and several participants discussed the ways in
+which word processing packages could be employed as the
+first stage in the \TeX\ `publishing' process. I would be
+dishonest if I didn't say that I felt this to be largely
+misdirected. We are still ready to accept the myth that
+\TeX\ is inherently difficult. As someone who finds
+getting out of WordPerfect in one piece really
+mind-bogglingly bizarre and arcane, \TeX\ seems easy as
+cake. Equally, few of the word processing proponents seem
+to have cottoned on to \LaTeX. \LaTeX\ actually makes
+life very easy for the so called naive user. We still
+seem to want to teach people to change font rather than
+to {\it emphasize\/}. I won't claim that \LaTeX\ is
+unequivocally excellent typographically, but it's a great
+deal better than your typist turned typesetter who still
+insists on underlining, double spacing and all the other
+gross indeciencies of typewriting. 
+As a sort of antidote, there were also several papers on
+the high quality end of typesetting.
+
+There were no parallel sessions (a great relief) and few
+last minute changes to the programme. As I've obliquely
+mentioned above, one of the key aspects of any conference
+is the social side. After all, the papers will likely all
+be written up one day, but the people you meet are the real
+gems of any conference. Since a large proportion of the
+participants were housed in the same block of residences
+(and my, they do have a spartan time at Stanford!) it was
+very easy to meet and mingle in the quadrangle (despite
+the limited time to do so!). If the conference seemed to
+run itself painlessly and effortlessly it was because the
+irrepressible Charlotte Laurendeau was skilfully joining
+the ends together, papering over the cracks and holding us
+all together.
+
+Will there be another meeting at Stanford? An interesting
+question. TUG meetings have been more mobile over the
+last few years -- Tufts, Montreal, \TeX as. This is a
+trend I would like to see continue (perhaps the 25th
+anniversary should come back to Stanford!), but there may
+be a danger that every meeting has to be bigger (and by
+definition, better), which would tend to encourage
+conservatism. If we look at the distance individual
+participants come for the conference, there are many who
+come from the `local' area. By taking the conference
+around North America it makes it easier for local \TeX
+ies to participate.
+\medskip
+\leftline{\sl Euro\TeX89}
+\leftline{\sl Karlsruhe, September 11--13th}
+\noindent
+\TeX89, or Euro\TeX89 as it seemed to call itself was
+truly European, but the participation from the US was
+encouraging too. Since the meeting was held in Karlsruhe
+there was a major German participation, and perhaps half
+of the papers were from the Germany-speaking world.
+Perhaps the most worrying feature was the relative lack of
+French participation. Perhaps the success of GUTenberg is
+siphoning off French attendees. This would be a great
+pity. But the success of the `national' or `language'
+groups may soon mean that the European meeting will suffer
+as a result.
+
+One or two papers resurfaced from TUG10. I'm afraid I
+agreed to rehash my own `Olde Worlde \TeX' (which I had
+rather hashed at Stanford -- I forgot that most of my
+audience didn't actually know where the Old World --
+Europe -- was); Peter Abbott gave his talk on the Aston
+Archive again, Rolf Olejniczak talked about {\tt texpic}
+(although it does have more features each time I hear
+about it) and Don Hosek talked about designing oriental
+characters with \MF. This was also the first run of Chris
+Rowley's now familiar talk on `What Don said at Stanford'.
+The replay of these papers is useful, since the talk
+evolves, and the audience was very, very, different
+(different planet, see above).
+
+It would be a bit invidious to pick best papers, but
+Mittelbach \& Sch\"opf's `With \LaTeX\ into the Nineties'
+(another refugee from Stanford, but for a different
+reason) clearly has much wider significance. It is a huge
+relief to see the baton of \LaTeX\ taken up by these two
+enormously capable, energetic and earnest enthusiasts. I
+had heard from `usually reliable sources' that Leslie
+Lamport had expected \LaTeX\ to die a natural death
+-- `replacing the dinosaur with a small furry mammal'.
+It looks as if this dinosaur has a good few millenia in
+it yet, and may even evolve into a small furry dinosaur
+of its own volition. (Where do we 
+get the idea that dinosaurs weren't fit to survive? They
+lasted a  longer than we are likely to.)
+
+Marek Ry\'cko and Bogus\l aw Jackowski's paper on Polish
+\TeX\ (or \LeX, for all sorts of reasons) was another
+taste of the future. The impact of \TeX\ in Eastern
+Europe is growing. The platform (of necessity rather than
+choice) is the pc; hard currency is still difficult to
+obtain, but public domain \TeX\ and drivers make it an
+ideal tool for one of the key components of
+liberalisation -- a printing press in the hands of the
+people. (Another aside: when I was in Warsaw Marek and I
+had an interview with the advisor to the Minister for
+Culture about using \TeX\ more widely\dots). Marek won
+the prize for `best paper'. I was particularly pleased by
+this.
+
+Anne Br\"uggeman-Klein's paper was, as expected
+thoughtful and showed \TeX's great potential, as well as
+many of the problems in `designing' documents. Standards
+cropped up; first through David Rodgers talk, stressing
+CALS, and then through Martin Bryan's `J\LaTeX' which
+showed an application which started life as an \sgml\
+document.
+
+One other harbinger of the future might be Konrad
+Neuwirth: not only was he talking about one of the nicest
+personal \TeX\ implementations -- on the Amiga -- but he
+was easily the youngest participant.
+
+There was a good exhibition area with lots of vendors
+(and even a peripatetic Stanford t-shirt salesperson -- I
+hadn't realised that tie-dye was still around).
+
+One interesting feature of the meeting was the
+publication of the wall-news\-paper, `Backslash'. This
+scurrilous example of the gutter press mysteriously
+appeared each morning. Since we're in the business of
+document preparation, it is surprising that this has not
+happened at \TeX\ conferences before. It certainly lent a
+(spurious) air of immediacy and incredibility to the
+proceedings.
+
+In summary, another useful contribution to the spread of
+\TeX\ knowledge and expertise. Again, apparently
+painlessly run, and with some very fine social events.
+The organisers, Anne Br\"uggeman-Klein and Rainer
+Rupprecht deserve much praise for this worthy successor
+to \TeX88. I keenly believe that the European \TeX\
+conferences are essential for the long term viability of
+\TeX, TUG and \TeX-in-Europe. Without these meetings, and
+without participation from the whole European catchment
+we will all be a great deal poorer. I look forward to more
+meetings like this one, but in Warsaw, in Budapest, in
+Moscow (and, if liberalisation continues, perhaps once
+again in the UK).
+\rightline{\sl Malcolm Clark}