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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} |