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+\title{Malcolm's Gleanings}
+\author[Malcolm Clark]{Malcolm Clark\\\texttt{m.clark@warwick.ac.uk}}
+\begin{Article}
+
+\section{TUG94, The Conference}
+My impressions of the TUG94 conference in Santa Barbara will be pretty
+general:\footnote{Readers who want a different view can peruse Michel
+ Goossens' article earlier in this issue of \BV.} I did not sit
+through every session and listen to every talk. To be frank, that's
+not really what I go to these events for. Since we had the preprints
+as part of the conference pack, I could (if I wanted) flick through
+and pick out the potentially interesting ones. Or better, see what was
+really dire, and ignore them. Since I seemed to be roped in to other
+conference stuff anyway, I kept having to disappear and find people.
+
+One distressing feature I did note was the inability of many speakers
+to address an audience. We are in a fairly large auditorium.
+Fortunately there are microphones, but in US style these are fixed
+rather than throat or lapel mikes. This does make mobility a problem,
+especially when you are trying to use overheads. So many people turn
+to the projected slide and point to it instead of pointing to the
+slide on the ohp and talking to the audience. A microphone simply
+does not catch your voice if you turn the back of your head to it.
+Honest. One other thing I notice is that the \TeX\ Users Group (or
+perhaps \TeX\ users) have little charisma. I suppose when the
+material is so worthy (\ie high in \emph{content}), the
+presentation (\ie the \emph{form}) shouldn't matter. I'm sorry, but
+it does. But again, when addressing an audience of presumed converts,
+perhaps we shouldn't worry about a lack of presentation skills. Again,
+I think not. It does make us look very amateurish, and not everyone in
+the audience is a convert.
+
+The conference had a number of `big names'. At least, it had some
+people who were well known, but not frequent attendees at the annual
+meeting. The first coup was Chuck Bigelow, who gave an entertaining
+enough talk, but its relevance to \TeX\ was not clear. Leslie Lamport's
+contribution was interesting, although when he started talking about \LaTeX4
+a shudder seemed to run through the \LaTeX3 team. He had something to
+say about structure editors, but informal discussions later suggested
+that he maligned them unfairly. If you want to visualise LL as you
+read the \LaTeX\ book, the Bibby lion cartoons in it are
+remarkably similar. Oren Patashnik
+also talked about \BibTeX. I had imagined someone at least seven feet tall.
+Perhaps the other `newcomer' I was hoping to see was Norm Walsh
+whose book `Making \TeX\ work' had just been published. (He nearly is
+seven feet tall.) Apart from that it was the usual gaggle of \TeX ies.
+
+In general the conference seemed to run smoothly, or at least, not
+many people saw the hitches. The most obvious hitch was the lack of
+tea or coffee on the afternoon of the first day. The overhead projectors
+could have been better. The vendors could also have had a better deal.
+To get to the vendors you had to poke your way through an apparent
+dead end, past a few bins and through a nondescript door. And all they
+had were a few tables.
+
+The social programme was slightly chaotic: it started with a reception
+where keg of Sierra Nevada turned out to be Michelob, but the bowling
+turned out well, with some pleasant surprises (the usual performances
+from Nelson Beebe and Ken Dreyhaupt, and a cute native American rain
+dance from Don `do people really think I'm a nerd' Hosek); the
+barbecue at the beach benefited from some real Sierra Nevada (as well
+as copious quantities of other comestibles); the boat trip was
+apparently a success, despite some upchucking and no whales -- and
+much confusion on how or when to get to the boat; the banquet (a
+buffet, actually) was limited in choice, but agreeable enough, and the
+music improved enormously as the evening progressed -- enough to get a
+surprising number of people on their feet, notably Tom `party animal'
+Rokicki.
+
+Now, I wouldn't like you to get the idea that we're only here to have
+a good time, but the social side really is valuable. You end up
+talking to all sorts of people and probably learn more useful stuff
+this way than in the rest of the conference. I toy with the idea of
+having one single parallel session and devoting the rest of the time
+to constructive socialisation.
+
+The `Tugly Telegraph' made its appearance each day. It's useful,
+since it has a more accurate daily programme, as well as instructions
+on how to get to `events', and other general bits and pieces. It is
+perhaps less successful than last year's at Aston, but then, its
+editor, John Berlin, is doing other jobs too (unlike last year's
+editor), and only occasional extra help with the newsletter. In any
+event, he manages to get each edition out before midnight on the
+preceding day. The crossword flops: no correct entries are submitted.
+Peter Flynn is obviously too subtle or devious.
+
+I'm told that the TUG general meeting overruns. This was one event I
+was determined to miss. The next two talks are more or less cancelled.
+As a result, there is a proposal that next year's general meeting
+will be open ended. This is naive. Given a choice between a general
+meeting at (say) four o'clock, which might run on till the evening,
+and catching a few rays on the beach, I know where I will be. On the
+other hand, slotting the meeting in at the beginning of the afternoon,
+I might just be carried along by inertia and attend. Of course, I'm
+jaded by the TUG board stuff. I've been there and I know that nothing
+changes, no matter how strongly you feel about it, and how sincerely
+you want to get things done. By not attending, I surrender my rights
+to comment. But I had a wonderful afternoon instead. How often do you
+get the chance to swim with dolphins?
+
+Apparently there is also some bizarre notion to reduce the membership
+fees, but to make \TUB\ optional. Somehow TTN will become a more
+general `journal', carrying some of \TUB's present material. What
+present material you may ask? It is now August 12th and no sign has
+been seen of the second edition of 1994 (volume 15 number 2). \TUB's
+calendar suggested that this edition would be mailed on May 23rd.
+When last year's final copies came out more or less on time I had
+supposed that it had finally managed to get its act together and was
+to be produced on a regular and reliable basis. Clearly I was deluded.
+What is the problem? I refuse to accept the usual story that it is a
+complex journal and that to achieve the standards required the devoted
+and underpaid or unpaid editorial volunteers have to devote limitless
+time and energy to it. \TUB\ is dying at the altar of quality. If the
+journal is to have any credibility it has to come out regularly. Maybe
+it really is too complex and \TeX\ is not really up to the production.
+Commercial publishers -- to whom we direct much encouragement to use
+\TeX\ -- could not allow themselves to be sucked into this cuckoo's
+nest. TUG has to try to be realistic and trim the sails of \TUB\ so
+that it can leave port. There are enough enemies of TUG, inside and
+outside the user group, who wish to see it dismembered, and who do not
+need to be able to point to \TUB\ to see graphic demonstration (or
+non-demonstration) of the health of the whole organisation.
+
+
+Another canard flies: despite the manifest evidence that this
+is an international conference (add up the speakers from outside
+the US) the old bogey that TUG is essentially a North American
+organisation reappears in discussions with some board members.
+They want some umbrella organisation to be formed from
+representatives of TUG (North America TUG), and the other
+user groups, which will somehow `direct' \TeX\ research
+and development. A likely tale. However, if TUG does uncouple
+itself from \TUB, this could be a serious proposal. If \TUB\
+is separate, I won't buy it, because the package of TUG plus
+\TUB\ membership will be too expensive. The only benefits
+that remain of TUG membership are cheaper fees to the
+annual meeting, and TTN. Only a very small proportion of
+TUG members go to the annual meeting (about 140 this year), and
+frankly, \BV\ is a far better deal than TTN (and similarly
+for most of the other user group newsletters). Anything
+important will appear in the local newsletters. So membership
+of TUG will decline further, since there are no perceived
+benefits.
+
+
+Eventually the conference winds down. Christina Thiele ---
+out-going (no pun intended, or even possible) President of TUG ---
+makes the closing announcements, failing to thank any
+of the local people who actually did make the conference work.
+Let me then record a sincere vote of thanks to John Berlin and
+Janet Sullivan of the TUG office, who were the `official' TUG representation,
+and who held the whole thing together. Similarly, the volunteer
+helpers of Suki Bhurji, Wendy Mckay and Katherine Butterfield
+were indispensable. Conferences don't run themselves.
+Since John is now leaving to continue his studies at UCLA
+(doing a course on multimedia) he will be sorely missed at
+the TUG office.
+
+What does next year hold? St Petersburg: the one in Florida,
+not the revisionist Leningrad or Petrograd. We are promised
+a hotel venue and an appeal to the publishing fraternity.
+My heart sinks into the alligator infested swamps.
+
+I think the conference was, on the whole, good value.
+It was probably too long. There is always a problem
+about fitting the talks in, and thoughts are expressed that
+some of the talks should not have been presented. This would
+of course cut down on the overall length. I honestly
+don't know. The written abstract which speakers
+submit is rarely a good yardstick for selecting
+the papers. The best suggestion I have heard was from Angus
+Duggan, who suggested a day in which speakers had ten minutes
+each to present their abstracts, then a massive set of parallel sessions
+the following day(s). You choose what to go to on the basis of the
+ten minute abstract. It might be worth trying. At least we
+would then have some time for the informal discussions and
+scheduled workshops. The venue was certainly good, the residences
+were fair, the food edible, the lack of a bar was a blow,
+the lecture theatre was too far away, the beach was excellent,
+the sun shone relentlessly,
+there were plenty meeting rooms/common rooms in the
+residence, conference services tended to verge towards the non-sexist
+airhead quality, the TUG helpers were overstretched. I do think
+it gelled pretty well. It's the most enjoyable TUG conference I've been
+to. An experience worth sharing.
+
+
+\section{Offizin}
+Whenever I pontificate about publishing with
+\TeX, someone will always bring me to
+earth by pointing out that the proceedings
+of the 1988 \TeX\ conference in Exeter took
+an interminable time to hit the bookshops.
+The figure is about two years (I was busy\dots).
+It was therefore a pleasant relief to
+receive \emph{Offizin} earlier this year
+This is a production of \textsc{Dante}, the german-speaking
+\TeX\ group. It is a publication designed
+to disseminate some of the lectures given
+at the group's `\TeX\ days'. I
+worked out just when I presented the paper which
+is produced in translation: it
+was February 1991. That makes the \TeX88 book
+look much less laggardly! Of course, what I had to say, about
+\emph{\TeX\ in Europe and America}, is hopelessly
+out of date, but when it appears in my list
+of publications, no-one will know that!
+
+Putting this schadenfreude aside, it is an
+interesting volume. It should be the first in
+a series, a series published by Addison Wesley
+(Germany). According to other bits of Addison Wesley,
+they don't do conference proceedings, so someone did
+some fancy footwork to get this through. Well done.
+
+One quote I managed to extract was `typography
+has its experts, but they have no audience'.
+
+
+\end{Article}
+\endinput
+\section{A cautionary tale}
+Background: I went to the \TeX\ Users Group Annual Meeting.
+I taught the \LaTeXe\ course which took place
+just before the meeting itself.
+
+Imagine the scene: the course starts at 9 on the Tuesday; I've managed
+to arrive in Santa Barbara by 8.30pm on Monday, expecting to be picked
+up and taken to the University (UCSB) and do a few last minute things.
+At 9 o'clock the lift arrived. The first thing to do is to get copies
+of the course notes. As the last bastion of the Empire, the US rarely
+uses A4 paper, so although I had a paper copy of the notes on A4, I
+hadn't expected to be able to copy those, and had both the source, and
+a suitable \texttt{dvi} file to print out, held on both Msdos and Mac
+floppies. But I didn't have a machine to print out on. The situation
+was confused, but apparently the original plan had been to use
+Macintoshes for the courses, but at the last moment it had been
+realised that 2Mbyte Macs are not really sufficient to run \LaTeXe,
+and the room had had a small network of NeXT machines installed
+instead. What was not installed at that time was \TeX\ and \LaTeX, or
+\LaTeXe. Fortunately my fears about a lack of A4 were unfounded and we
+could copy from my originals. At least we did have the new Lamport
+\LaTeX\ manual, and I was able to spend the Tuesday morning before
+breakfast reading it, just in case there is something in it I hadn't
+expected. There isn't.
+
+By the time I got to the teaching lab next day, \TeX\ and \LaTeX\
+were installed. The astute will note that I don't say that \LaTeXe\ was
+installed. It wasn't. At no point do my notes use \verb+\documentstyle+,
+and in fact, I've tried to eliminate all reference to the obsolete
+version. Starting off by dropping back to \LaTeX2.09 was not what I
+had planned. And of course there was the nagging worry of when
+\LaTeXe\ would be installed. I knew it had to be, since Frank
+Mittelbach and Michel Goosens were about to start their course the next day,
+using the same machines.
+
+Naturally I start off with a spiel and then get down to hammering the
+keyboards a little later. Unlike most previous TUG classes I've
+taught, I had no locals who knew the system, or even a local guru to
+fall back on. Thus when we came to log on we had a minor upset --
+what's the account and password? Solved by a phone call to the TUG
+office. Ever used a NeXT? It's a sort of cross between a reasonable
+Unix GUI and a Mac. But it was unfamiliar to all the students (and
+me). The dyed in the wool Unix buff found this mouse stuff a bit
+painful, and the rest of us found the command line interface lurking
+below the surface just a little off-putting. But in general we managed
+to cope. The NeXT comes with an excellent \TeX\ implementation from
+Tom Rokicki with a good previewer and \textsf{dvips}. It's a fair
+\TeX\ engine, although perhaps a shade slow by current standards, but
+adequate for teaching. The main delays in hardware were from the
+server, where the disk seemed very slow. One point of confusion to the
+students was that we were all in the same account, so we had
+sub-directories for each student. Sometimes people worked in the
+higher directory. I would not recommend sharing the same directory in
+class teaching. Of course this is the same directory that Frank \&
+Michel were going to use too, with all of their class\dots
+
+By restructuring the order of presentation I was able
+to keep away from topics which were \LaTeXe\ specific.
+This was starting to become a problem on the next day, when we
+still didn't have the new implementation. I had brought
+the latest CTAN installation on floppy, partly anticipating
+this problem. Why then didn't I just install it?
+\begin{enumerate}
+\item it was a set of \textsf{zip}ped MSDOS files;
+\item I didn't have any root or system privileges on the server
+\end{enumerate}
+or why didn't I just download from CTAN?
+\begin{enumerate}
+\item[3] we were not on the Internet
+\end{enumerate}
+Eventually we did find a PC (and I had brought \textsf{pkunzip}) and
+downloaded onto floppies which the NeXT could read. By this
+time Frank and a local systems person arrived and they happily
+spent the afternoon installing stuff. By now we are in
+contention with Frank \& Michel for the use of the room.
+Naturally we both want access when the class requires it,
+and none of us had anticipated structuring our classes to
+accommodate this sort of sharing. At least by late on the second
+day we could start using \LaTeXe. Things were getting better.
+
+On Thursday, the system was dead. It had crashed. How do you
+reboot a NeXT server system? Naturally, Unix systems people
+at UCSB are techno-weenies and spend their nights doing
+whatever Unix people do with their lives. They don't come in till
+about 11 at the earliest. This is not good. When all else
+fails, you can always try a power interrupt (\ie switch it
+off and on again). Ever found the on/ off switch on a NeXT? It
+is well hidden. Fortunately, John Berlin of the TUG office managed
+to get things going. This eats into our lab time, with Frank \& Michel breathing
+down our necks. And although I supposedly have a seminar room
+in the same building, no-one seems to know where it is, exactly:
+hand waving `down the corridor and up some stairs' descriptions lack
+precision.
+
+This morning (Friday), the laser printer is out of paper.
+We have a sort of arrangement with the reception desk
+that they will do little gofering jobs. This seems to
+fit the bill. A digression. UCSB is famous for a couple of
+courses. Surfing 101 and Tanning 101 are among these. The latter
+is designed for the more intellectually able. Rachel, on the desk,
+was majoring in Surfing. The exchange ran approximately
+as follows:
+\begin{description}
+\item[me:]We seem to be out of paper for the laser printer.
+\item[Rachel:] Oh, really?
+\item[me:] Is there a number to ring to obtain some more?
+\item[Rachel:]Yes.
+\item[me:]Could you do that for me?
+\item[Rachel]Uh-huh.
+\end{description}
+She picks up phone, dials, I return to the lab.
+A few minutes later she pops her head round the
+door to announce that `We don't have any small paper, will
+the larger size do?'
+A little startled by the idea
+of using the A3 equivalent, I grunted assent.
+As you will probably have guessed,
+we got 12 inch fan fold continuous printer paper. That's what
+computers use. One of the class took over and obtained
+a ream of copy paper. Simple.
+The remainder of the day has few problems. By this time
+I had managed to obtain a copy of the Companion, so that the
+class has a chance to see what extra goodies are available.
+They already have Lamport's new \LaTeX~2e (2nd edition) book,
+although I had forbidden them to read it until
+after the course ended.
+
+What lessons can be learned? The first thing that struck me was
+that \LaTeXe\ is perhaps not quite as widely adopted,
+or even known about, as I had anticipated. People coming on courses
+are seldom TUG members, and are along either as a sort of refresher,
+or to add to their existing `document processing' skills. I had
+some secretarial staff and some editorial staff (and a sort of overviewer).
+They are not mainstream \TeX ies who read \texttt{comp.text.tex}, or TTN,
+and far less \TUB. Most of them would be going back to a \LaTeX2.09
+installation, although I hope I gave them enough impetus to
+get their systems people to install \LaTeXe.
+We really have to push information about \LaTeXe\ out more
+widely.
+
+It does help to have liaison at hand. And to have someone
+come and check that all is well each morning. In an ideal world,
+the logging on/ password, NeXT familiarisation,
+the system crash or the paper shortage would have
+been but minor hiccups.
+
+The small class size (about 7) was a boon. I reckon it takes four
+days to get through my course. Thanks to the ease of use of the NeXT,
+the keyboard skills of the class (and their general computer
+familiarity), and the small class size, I think we could have
+trimmed that down to three and a half. The problem is always
+getting round each member of the class. If you spend 5 minutes
+with each, a class of twelve takes an hour to get round. Simple
+arithmetic.
+Extra exercises for the swift are useful. It gives you something
+to absorb their enthusiasm, while allowing the slower members to
+concentrate on reinforcing the essentials.
+
+Sharing a lab reduces flexibility and requires that you plan things
+much more carefully. Knowing the requirement in advance helps.
+
+Ensure that the class eat together. This sounds weird, but let me
+explain. Some of the class did not live in the residences on campus.
+Their course fee did not cover lunch. Therefore they had to go and eat
+somewhere else. They didn't then know when the rest of us were
+heading back, and this could delay starting the afternoon session. A
+small point, but it all adds or subtracts to the smooth running of the
+class. After all, these people pay good money to come on this course,
+we have to ensure they get a fair deal.
+
+