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authorNorbert Preining <norbert@preining.info>2019-09-02 13:46:59 +0900
committerNorbert Preining <norbert@preining.info>2019-09-02 13:46:59 +0900
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+\centerline{\bf \TeX\ et les Arts Graphiques}
+\smallskip
+\noindent
+GUTenberg finally decided to forsake Paris and travel out
+to the provinces for its annual conference. It chose
+Toulouse, the aerospace capital of Europe, for this
+adventure. The conference took place on May 15--17th, at
+the Universit\'e Paul-Sabatier, just outside Toulouse
+itself. I can recommend Toulouse. It is a particularly
+pleasant city. It's only disadvantage would seem to be
+its apparent inaccessibility from Paris (and most other
+places in France). (No bad thing I hear you mutter.)
+
+As usual there were courses before and after the
+conference. The `tutorial' with Blanchard \&
+Mandell (two French typographers of renown) was
+particularly interesting, although it did seem to me that
+there are definite `cultural' colourings which make it
+difficult to conceive of a `European' typography, except
+in a very bland and generalised way. The introduction of
+real publishers offered some needed rationalisations.
+
+The conference itself began on the 16th, with the AGM:
+like TUG, GUTenberg almost encourages you to stay away
+from this, but as a member I find myself drawn
+inexorably, if only to see how such matters are conducted
+in another foreign country: like TUG, elections are
+discouraged, and the committee\slash board is appointed,
+not elected: officers seem to serve for as long as they
+want: the floor does not challenge the executive
+(except perhaps over the matter of the location of
+GUTenberg's file server).
+
+Nelson Beebe gave a presentation on \TeX\ and TUG.
+Michael Ferguson (with bicycle as usual) discussed some of
+the aspects of \TeX3, some of its shortcomings, and some
+ways ML-\TEX\ users could adopt an upwards compatible path.
+Lance Carnes (another frequent attendee of GUTenberg)
+scooped the vendors by having his company's versions of
+\TeX3 for the pc available in a variety of attractive
+shapes and sizes. There can be no doubt that Personal
+\TeX\ Inc has created and is marketing a well thought out
+and timely range of products.
+
+One of the highlights of the meeting was the paper by
+C\'erin \& Lemaire on colour in \TeX. Some details will
+be found in the abstract of their paper, given elsewhere
+in \Texline. Collin, of Tr\'ema showed a range of
+examples of work which his company had done for clients.
+In many cases it would have been hard to see the hand of
+\TeX. Tr\'ema did what the client asked, not what \TeX\
+wanted to do. He did agree that there were many
+challenges. One of the other highlights was Grimault's
+paper which charted the difficulties her company had
+encountered in using \LaTeX\ as their typesetting tool.
+There was a frustrating blend of misinformation, naivety
+and plain bad luck. One of the afternoon's sessions was
+given to a discussion on the `possibilities of \TeX'.
+This was quickly taken over by Fran\c cois Chahuneau who
+came with a wide range of complaints and problems with
+using \TeX\ for professional typesetting. Fiery stuff.
+
+Since most of the papers were printed in the {\it
+Cahiers} whose abstracts are printed here, it is best to
+concentrate on one particular paper, that of Daniel
+Taupin, who had created some superb macros to permit the
+typesetting of polyphonic and instrumental music in
+\TeX. This was a real tour de force. People who read
+music even agreed that the typesetting was quite
+acceptable (in other words, looked like what they were
+used to). Fran\c cois also came back to talk about
+\sgml, but he was much more restrained (who can get hot
+and bothered about \sgml?). Larry Siebenmann also gave a
+short talk on \LamSTeX.
+
+In the final session, two individuals were named as
+`members of honour' of GUTenberg -- Michael Ferguson (in
+recognition of ML-\TEX, which is dostributed by
+GUTenberg), and Nicolas Brouard, who did most of the
+donkey work in creating, copying and distributing the
+GUT89 floppies, a public domain {\sc ms-dos}
+implementation.
+
+I don't know that there was much on `Graphic Arts', and
+the turnout, much lower than the Paris meetings, was
+disappointing, but nevertheless there were some good
+papers and some good discussions. Time keeping could have
+been improved, although Bernard Gaulle was stringent in
+starting the sessions on time. It would be unfortunate
+if GUTenberg were discouraged from venturing out of
+Paris again, although next year's meeting will be back in
+Paris, on the 28th--30th of May, when the subject will
+be scientific and technical publishing.
+
+As normal with european meetings, accommodation is never
+anywhere near the conference venue, nor is it likely that
+people will be in the same hotels. Nevertheless there was
+still plenty of opportunity to talk to people through the
+conference and in the evenings. I was pleased to see that
+there were a fair few fellow `anglo-saxons', as english
+speakers are quaintly described in France, some exiles
+and some just trippers like myself. GUTenberg had a good
+international feeling to it this year, perhaps assisted
+by the simultaneous translation of the papers into
+French and English (as appropriate). Despite the teething
+disfficulties of getting people to talk into microphones,
+this worked reasonably well.
+
+There is however one other GUTenberg `issue' that needs
+comment. Bernard Gaulle has proposed that TUGboat
+should be printed in France as well as the United States.
+The principal reason put forward for this is to reduce
+the delivery time: the argument is that travel times
+within europe are bound to be less than those from the
+US, but that production costs in europe, per copy, would
+be about the same, once the higher trans-Atlantic freight
+charge was taken into account.
+
+Superficially, this has
+some appeal, but there are a number of problems: a second
+set of plates would have to be made and sent to the
+subsidiary printing location; the print run in the US
+would be smaller, incurring higher unit cost there (since
+a high proportion of the cost is in set-up, the unit cost
+would not be simply proportional to the print run); and
+would the delay be minimised? In my experience, mail from
+France is no faster than trans-Atlantic mail. The
+last edition of TUGboat, 11(2) reached the UK about
+a week after it reached addresses in the US. I'm
+sceptical that mail from France would be that much
+quicker, or that the week is so important. Perhaps there
+could be some speed up for those in France, but I doubt
+whether any other european countries would notice the
+difference.
+
+I must admit too that I would prefer to
+receive the US-printed version rather than a `daughter'
+copy, even if I had to wait an extra two or three days.
+Since it takes me a long time to read TUGboat, and there
+is seldom anything in it which is time-critical, I don't
+regard its timing as crucial. I know there are those to
+whom it does matter.
+
+I can envisage a much more exciting project: one which
+allows us to exploit some of the features of \TeX:
+transmit TUGboat {\it electronically\/} to a `daughter'
+location, and allow the plates to be created there for
+production. I'm not thinking of each person running files
+through their local laser printer -- that's silly: the
+paper sizes are wrong, the resolution is limited, there
+is no scope to bind it properly: no, transmit {\tt
+dvi}. There are problems here, but they are problems
+whose solution gives greater credence to \TeX's claims
+as an electronic interchange medium. Sending plates
+(even if they were scanned at high resolution and
+transmitted electronically) advances us nowhere.
+\author{\mwc}
+