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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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+\author[Michel Goossens]{Michel Goossens\\CERN\\ CH-1211\\ Geneva 23\\ Switzerland
+\texttt{goossens@cern.ch}}
+
+\title{CyrTUG94 in Dubna, September 7--11}
+\begin{Article}
+
+
+It was raining when our Swissair plain touched down after a flight
+which took us in just over three hours from Geneva to Moscow. It
+was almost five years since I was last in the Capital of Russia,
+and indeed a lot seemed to have changed during that period. Prices
+have gone up between one and ten thousand times (e.g. a metro or
+bus ticket which used to be a few kopecks, now costs over one
+hundred Rubles), with inflation still running at between five and
+ten percent per month. Many streets and squares in central Moscow
+have recovered their 19th century names and also the metro
+stations that were named after one or another of the heroes of the
+Revolution now have received a more neutral sounding name.
+
+
+It was CyrTUG's Executive Director, Irina Makhovaya, who met me at
+Sheremetievo airport, and took me to her apartment at the
+beginning of Kutuzovskiy Prospekt, close to the Kievskaya metro
+station, and the huge Stalin-style Ukraina Hotel. From the balcony
+of the comfortable three room apartment situated on the nineth
+floor one also has a nice view of the famous ``White House'' about
+one kilometer away. I had the pleasure of staying with Irina and her
+daughter Olga for the first two days.
+
+On Monday September 5th, the day following my arrival, we went to
+Mir Publishers, the place where Irina is working, and which also
+houses the CyrTUG office. Irina has an email connection on a PC
+via a modem, and they keep part of the CyrTUG electronic archives
+on a hard disk connected to one of the Mir PC's, that are used to
+enter text. At Mir they use Ventura for simple texts and TeX for
+more complicated copy with formulae. Due to the economic crisis,
+and the relatively low wages the production of scientific books,
+in which Mir Publishers specializes, has drastically decreased,
+and the production of titles has dropped by more than an order of
+magnitude, the staff having been cut by over three quarters. This
+is not only due to the fact that people have not a lot of money to
+buy scientific books, but also because of the high inflation, the
+high cost of paper and the collapse of the distribution system.
+Therefore most books are produced, printed and sold locally in the
+big centers of the country.
+
+
+CyrTUG has about 300 members, with 37 institutional members.
+Knowing that the average monthly wage of a scientific collaborator
+is about the equivalent of $ 50 (when I was there one had 2230
+Rubles for one $ ), it is evident that the membership rates cannot
+be very high (about 6000 Rubles/year for an individual member,
+half that for a student). The whole afternoon of the Monday Irina,
+and her collaborators spent making the last preparations for the
+CyrTUG94 Conference, that was starting on the following Wednesday,
+and which was the main reason for my visit to Russia. Since
+electronic communications are mostly very poor and expensive in
+Russia, the main means of transferring files is via PC diskettes,
+and therefore the whole CyrTUG archive was copied from the
+reference PC to a streamer tape, that could just contain the sixty
+Mbytes that made up the most important part of the Vinogradov
+archive (M. Vinogradov---CyrTUG archivist). The streamer tape,
+plus all the necessary cables, several boxes of 3.5 and 5.25 inch
+diskettes, books, and other material was distributed over many
+bags, that we would have to carry with us to Dubna, where the
+Conference was taking place.
+
+
+So, the next morning, we had to get up at six in the morning, to
+meet the other CyrTUG and Mir organisers of the conference Marina
+Kuznetsova, Olga Lapko, Irina Tereshkina, and Sergei Strelkov at
+Savelovski Railway Station to take the 7:40 direct train to Dubna,
+where we arrived about 10 o'clock. We were met by a member of the
+local Organizing Committee, Y. Stolarskiy, in a mini-bus, that
+also contained three PC's, that would allow the participants of
+the conference to exchange files. While everybody drove off to
+Ratmino, the location of the Conference hotel, situated at a very
+pittoresque site where the Dubna river flows into the Volga. I
+went with V.Korenkov, the deputy director of Dubna's Computing and
+Automatization Division for a visit of the various departments of
+this division, that I already visited a few times before. The town
+of Dubna, which lies about 120 km north of Moscow, houses JINR,
+the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research, which is a research
+center of eighteen countries, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus,
+Bulgaria, Cuba, the Czech Republic, Georgia, Kazakhstan, the
+D.P.Republic of Korea, Moldova, Mongolia, Poland, Romania, Russia,
+the Slovak Republic, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Vietnam, and with
+Germany having an observer status. It is somewhat the East
+European and Central Asean equivalent to the European Center for
+Particle Physics (CERN) in Geneva, and many links have been
+established between JINR and CERN over the years. The Institute
+now has two 64 Kbit satellite links to the Internet (soon to be
+upgraded to twice 128 kbit), they have a local area network of
+more than 1000 machines (mostly PC's but now also an ever
+increasing number of Sun workstations, and some other Unix
+machines with a few remaining VMS and IBM mainframes). They have
+all the main archives (for X-window, gnu, CTAN, PC,...) local on
+their machines and during the week it was decided that Dubna would
+serve as the CyrTUG local CTAN node. They have several WWW servers
+up and running, and have produced a WWW hypertext structure
+describing the Institute, that can be accessed with the URL
+http://www.jinr.dubna.su/. It was also an occasion to meet once
+more many of my Russian colleagues, with whom I worked before in
+Russia or in Geneva.
+
+
+After rejoining the CyrTUG group in Ratmino, about four km away to
+the NE of the Institute, we spent the better part of the afternoon
+setting up the PC's for the next day, copying the archive to the
+hard disks, connecting the modem, preparing the badges, ... .
+
+
+The bulk of the participants to the CyrTUG 94 Conference arrived
+at about 11 o'clock at Ratmino on Wednesday September 7th, after
+taking the same train as we the previous day. There were about
+sixty Russians who came from Ekaterinburg, Kazan, Moscow,
+Novosibirsk, Nizhniy Novgorod, Sankt Petersburg, Yaroslavl', and
+of course Dubna itself, and three non-Russians, namely Kees van
+der Laan, the founding President and now Honorary member of NTG
+(and also a member of CyrTUG), John Linn Roseman, an American
+working for a software company in Sankt Peterburg, and myself.
+
+
+At 12 o'clock I.Makhovaya formally opened the Conference, Vladimir
+Korenkov, the chairman of the organizing Committee spoke a few
+words of welcome, followed by Youry Stolarsky of Dubna, who
+explained the local arrangements. Then the Scientific secretary of
+the Institute explained the importance of TeX for the scientists
+in Dubna as a means of communicating their results to the outside
+world. After that I walked onto the stage and before giving a one
+hour summary of the presentations made at the TUG94 Conference in
+Santa Barbara in the Summer, I spoke a few words on behalf of TUG,
+congratulating CyrTUG with the organisation of their conference,
+and informing those present that I not only had come to Russia to
+give presentations, but also that I was there to listen to them,
+and to find out how TUG, as the international TeX users group, can
+contribute to help them solve their problems in the area of
+support to all those using the Cyrillic alphabet with TeX. During
+the following days I had various occasions to discuss these
+matters with the participants, so that I could form myself a
+better picture of the situation.
+
+
+In the afternoon the different speakers presented their experience
+with introducing and developing TeX tools in their respective
+institutes, and the particular problems encountered when using
+Russian and the Cyrillic alphabet. A particularly interesting
+exchange of opinion took place when the representative of the
+publication department of JINR came to tell us why they think that
+TeX is so difficult to use for marking up documents, especially
+for non-technical staff that have to enter the text into the
+computer. When moving from a dedicated typesetting system, to PC's
+for data entering, the Publication Department decided to adopt
+Ventura, especially to make the transition from the former
+dedicated system to the computer less painful for the staff,
+mainly because it allows for WYSIWYG data entry. Now, however, the
+scientific collaborators of the Institute want them to make the
+transition to LaTeX to ease the communication with the rest of the
+world and also because mathematical formulae look a lot better
+with TeX. During the discussion that followed it was emphasized
+several times that TeX syntax is unituitive for the non-scientist,
+and that the learning curve is very steep. Nevertheless, the
+decision had been taken to enter the technical articles with LaTeX
+and during the time of the conference a LaTeX course for beginners
+was offered to the members of the Publishing Department (and to
+all those who were interested), and was followed by about twenty
+people.
+
+
+Since I arrived in Russia, the weather had become sunny, and even
+warm, so that after dinner, all participants went for a walk to
+the very point where the Dubna river throws itself into the Volga,
+and on the way back we passed by a nice little church in typical
+Russian style, that was being renovated. After the walk we met in
+one of the rooms of the participants and had one of those ``Slav''
+evenings, with Vodka, sausage, bread, cheese, onion, cucumber,
+followed by tea and biscuits. These are the occasions where one
+really gets to know each other and can appreciate the meaning of
+words like hospitality, friendship, and mutual understanding.
+
+
+The next morning Sergey Strelkov and I accompanied the
+participants to the introductory LaTeX course to the Institute,
+where I had a meeting with the local WWW guru to discuss common
+developments, while Sergey wanted to use the occasion to get hold
+of 100 Mbytes of files by copying what he needed onto the streamer
+tapes he brought with him from Moscow. After we got back to the
+conference site we could still enjoy presentations about how to
+design Cyrillic fonts, the use of PostScript and vector fonts,
+WYSIWYG approaches, and a discussion of the use of TeX at Moscow
+State University, where there is now a very active group led by
+Evgeniy Pankratiev. After lunch I participated in a round table
+discussion on the various coding-schemes presently in use for the
+Cyrillic alphabet. Already in May of this year a similar meeting
+in Moscow did not succeed in adopting a common coding scheme for
+all languages that are using the Cyrillic alphabet (apart from
+Russian that are Bielorussian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Serb,
+Moldavian, and many of the languages of the CIS). There are at
+least three main coding schemes, namely KOI8, Alternativiy, ISO
+8859-7, plus code page CP866, which all differ in their layout. A
+supplementary problem is where the non-Russian Cyrillic characters
+are to be placed. With the advent of Unix, and X-window X11R6,
+which seems to favor ISO, but taking into account the fact that
+most users are on PC's that are not even connected to the network,
+it will not be trivial to come up with a solution, which might not
+even be so important anyway, since, when one wants to communicate,
+one can always transform the encoding into one that is generally
+adopted. And here Unicode (and the Omega TeX extension of
+Y.Haralambous and J.Plaice) is without doubt the (long term)
+answer. It was decided to form a three member working group to
+come up with a proposal to define a ``CyrTUG standard encoding''.
+
+
+The Friday we had a few more presentations about the use of
+graphics, experience with using TeX in publishing houses for the
+production of scientific journals, and issues of typography. The
+afternoon was dedicated to a question and answer session, where
+everybody could come with his problem(s) and get an answer, or
+share experience with fellow TeX users.
+
+
+At 19:00 the grand banquet started, and after the ritual series of
+toasts to a better future, friendship, more TeX and less
+approximate typography, ... , we went all onto the dance floor and
+on the tune of some typical and other less-typical modern Russian
+tunes, transformed ourselves into TeX rockers till the music
+stopped at 11 o'clock and we all dispersed into subgroups to
+continue tour last evening together, or, too tired to do anything
+useful, just went to bed.
+
+
+The Saturday morning started with my LaTeX2e course that lasted to
+approximately midday, when CyrTUG's business meeting started.
+After the report of the Executive Director, and the Treasurer, the
+activity report and the accounts were accepted. Then Evgeniy
+Pankratiev (Moscow State University) was elected as new President
+of CyrTUG, succeeding Joseph Romanovsky of Sankt Petersburg. With
+the new President in the chairman's seat the meeting then adopted
+the plan for 1994/95 and declared the 1994 Conference closed,
+thanking the participants for their support.
+
+
+Then we all took the train back to Moscow and during the trip we
+decided that it would be extremely useful that CERN became an
+institutional member of CyrTUG, because of the many exchanges
+between Dubna and CERN scientists, and the fact that more and more
+visitors to CERN want to be able to use the same environment as at
+their home institute, and continue work on documents they started
+in their home country. As Dubna is also an institutional member,
+CERN will be able to contribute in the area of expertise and
+communications. In agreement with the Dubna Institute is was also
+decided to submit Dubna's candidature to the TUG Conference
+Planning Committee to organize the 1996 TUG Conference.
+
+
+It was misty when we got up on the Sunday morning around nine
+o'clock, and the streets were almost empty since all Moskovites
+who can afford it spend the weekend on their (or a friend's)
+datcha in the countryside surrounding the city. So Irina, Olga and
+I had our last breakfast together, Irina took a few pictures, as a
+souvenir, we discussed what a success the conference had been, and
+already started making plans for next year. Then we took
+trolley-bus number two, that took us down Kutuzovskiy Prospekt, to
+Noviy Arbat, past the White House, then along the Sadovaya, the
+open air swimming pool, the banks of the Moskova, up in front of
+the Kremlin to Teatralnaya Square (with the Bolshoy Theater), then
+the metro and the bus to the airport, where I had to take leave of
+Irina, who had been such a perfect hostess. During the flight back
+to Geneva, which took almost forty minutes longer than the flight
+to Moscow, due to 200 km/hour head winds, I paused to look back at
+the interesting and rich experience I had gained during my six-day
+stay in Russia. I have visited Russia many times before, but
+things seem different now, there is hope, people talk freely, they
+all feel they are moving towards a better future, also
+financially, yet I think they still have a long way to go. And it
+is precisely here that we can help our colleagues and friends, by
+developing tools that are freely available, and distributing our
+publications and magazines to them. The main problem in Russia is
+communication, getting the information and material to different
+places, so by sending them one or more copies of our publications
+(or making them electronically available, so that they can be
+distributed on diskettes if there are no reliable networks) we can
+contribute to the distribution of TeX in Russia, and the other
+States of the CIS.
+\end{Article} \ No newline at end of file