summaryrefslogtreecommitdiff
path: root/usergrps/uktug/baskervi/5_4/tug-repo.tex
diff options
context:
space:
mode:
Diffstat (limited to 'usergrps/uktug/baskervi/5_4/tug-repo.tex')
-rw-r--r--usergrps/uktug/baskervi/5_4/tug-repo.tex93
1 files changed, 93 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/usergrps/uktug/baskervi/5_4/tug-repo.tex b/usergrps/uktug/baskervi/5_4/tug-repo.tex
new file mode 100644
index 0000000000..4ae854d7c3
--- /dev/null
+++ b/usergrps/uktug/baskervi/5_4/tug-repo.tex
@@ -0,0 +1,93 @@
+\documentclass{article}
+\usepackage{mflogo,multicol,shortvrb}
+\usepackage{bv-emu}
+
+\MakeShortVerb\|
+
+\begin{document}
+\section*{A first-timer's impression of TUG95}
+
+\begin{multicols}{2}
+Well, we've heard Malcolm Clark's view of Florida as a meeting venue,
+and I'm not going to suggest that you ignore him: but it turns out
+that Mimi Burbank had selected a remarkably good venue\footnote{Though
+ it must be admitted that it was expensive!}, and despite the general
+decline in TUG membership in general (and meeting attendances in
+particular), we had a particularly jolly meeting.
+
+What's Florida like? Well, on my previous visit (for a standards
+meeting in January 1986), the air was crisp and cool (the
+orange-growers were complaining bitterly about frosts), and the
+weather was unremittingly sunny. This time, at the end of July, the
+air was muggy and hot, it rained every day, and on the west coast of
+Florida we only saw part of one sunset during the course of the
+meeting\footnote{On the day of the excursion, the sun set between two
+ hotels on a distant shore, having been shrouded in cloud up to that
+ point (and the rain came again immediately afterwards)}.
+
+The hotel backs on to the beach on the Gulf of Mexico, and the
+energetic could swim at all sorts of hours (Pierre Mackay, for
+example, claimed to have swum at 6am on the first day of the meeting).
+The sea water was startlingly warm, which rather dulled the effect of
+the hotel hot-tub that I (at least) regularly dipped in after
+swimming.
+
+And what of my personal highlights in the meeting? Well, I (as
+proceedings editor) had read most of the formal papers before they
+were presented, but I was enormously impressed by T.~V. Raman's talk
+about audio rendering despite that. His argument for structured
+markup is so strong as to be almost irresistible.
+
+I delighted in the papers by Ji\v r\'\i{} Zlatu\v ska (extending Alan
+Hoenig's ideas on composite logo design) and Jeremy Gibbons (dotted
+and dashed lines, ending up with muskrats) on doing yet more
+extraordinary things with \MF{}. I almost never write metafont code
+myself, but I still find it fascinating.
+
+Alan Hoenig's own paper on making use of Adobe's Poetica fonts was
+that rare animal, the technically interesting paper that also
+expressed great beauty.
+
+Gabriel Valiente Feruglio's passionate paper on typesetting Catalan
+was presented with great wit and erudition by Pierre Mackay. Feruglio
+and Petr Sojka (on compound word hyphenation) did the conference great
+service by reminding us all that we ignore support for languages other
+than our own at our peril. (I tried to make the same point in the
+panel session on \Om{}, talking to a revision of what I published in
+\BV{} volume~5 number~3.)
+
+The most surprising sessions (to me) were the ones on standards (the
+new \TeX{} directory structure, presented by Norm Walsh, and standards
+for DVI processor specials, presented by Tom Rokicki (of |dvips| and,
+now, dancing fame) and Mike Sofka. I was also fascinated by the
+discussions of journal production; the accounts of how the massive
+Elsevier machine produces (and archives) its enormous range of
+journals, and how the American community is slowly moving towards the
+same end. My accolade for most useful piece of work reported goes to
+Sergey Lesenko: Tom Rokicki has taken up his work on partial font
+downloading for a future version of dvips. As the one who regularly
+worries whether issues of \BV{} will fit on one floppy disc for
+submission to the Docutech printer, I shall no doubt be able to sleep
+easier in my bed in future\dots
+
+And there was Knuth. Knuth came because he had promised to when he
+last attended. It was, he said, the \ensuremath{2^{2^{2^{2^{-\infty}}}}}th
+meeting, and who's to argue with the great man? (Actually, I think
+most mathematics lecturers would, but I'm inclined to forgive the man:
+his eccentric sense of humour makes so much of his writing a real
+joy.) He gave an extended question and answer session immediately
+before the sessions on \Om, \NTS{} and \eTeX: in the circumstances, he
+very understandably dodged questions about ``what he would do
+differently if he were starting today''. He spent ages discussing how
+he was going about typesetting errata for the first three volumes of
+\textsl{the Art of Computer Programming}. Among other errata, he has
+removed Fermat's last theorem as a `research problem' and replaced it
+with something about fourth powers of integers; he was obviously
+delighted that the final publication of Wiles' proof of the theorem
+was set in \TeX{} (and looked beautiful!).
+
+\rightline{Robin Fairbairns}
+
+\rightline{\texttt{rf@cl.cam.ac.uk}}
+\end{multicols}
+\end{document}