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+%\documentclass[a4paper]{article}
+%%
+%\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
+%\usepackage{mflogo,
+% relsize,%
+% textcomp,%
+% xspace}
+%%
+%\providecommand\acro[1]{%
+% \textsmaller{#1}\@}
+\providecommand\tug{\acro{TUG}}
+\providecommand\UKTUG{\acro{UKTUG}\xspace}
+\providecommand\CyrTUG{\acro{C}yr\tug}
+\providecommand\BV{\emph{Baskerville}}
+\providecommand\TeXtoPDF{\TeX2\acro{PDF}}
+\makeatletter
+% TUGboatery
+\def\thinskip{\hskip 0.16667em\relax}
+\def\endash{--}
+\def\emdash{\endash-}
+\def\d@sh#1#2{\unskip#1\thinskip#2\thinskip\ignorespaces}
+\def\dash{\d@sh\nobreak\endash}
+\def\Dash{\d@sh\nobreak\emdash}
+%
+% from Mark Wooding
+\providecommand{\cmd}[1]{\expandafter\texttt\expandafter{\string#1}\cmd@i}
+
+\def\cmd@i{\futurelet\@let@token\cmd@ii}
+\def\cmd@ii{%
+ \let\@tempa\relax%
+ \ifx\@let@token\bgroup%
+ \def\@tempa##1{\texttt{\char`\{}\textit{##1}\texttt{\char`\}}\cmd@i}%
+ \fi%
+ \ifx\@let@token[%]
+ \def\@tempa[##1]{\texttt{[}\textit{##1}\texttt{]}\cmd@i}%
+ \fi%
+ \@tempa%
+}
+\makeatother
+\providecommand\TUB{\textsl{TUGboat}}
+%
+%\begin{document}
+\title{\tug'96\Dash fun and profit in Dubna}
+\author{Robin Fairbairns}
+\begin{Article}
+
+\section*{Travel}
+
+I was instructed by the \UKTUG{} committee to attend \tug'96 to
+represent the group. On a flight that cost less than half as much as
+\acro{BA}'s cheapest, the trip to Moscow was pretty simple. Russian
+immigration was tedious, but more ominous was the requirement to fill
+in a form declaring how much foreign currency (and Roubles) we were
+carrying, as well as the amount of ammunition and general weaponry,
+not to mention religious icons and the like. One has grown used to
+being asked whether one is carrying weapons at the \emph{beginning} of
+a flight\dots
+
+Eventually the whole of the \tug{} board was being led by Irina
+Makhovaya of \CyrTUG{} across the airport car park to find the minibus which was to take
+us to Dubna. If the ones we encountered were typical, Russian roads
+are pretty awful. The forests we drove through were predominantly
+birch and pine (the proportions vary). The birches have startlingly
+bright white bark, which catches the sun; when mixed with the pines'
+dark bark, the effect is really striking. We kept passing really
+fancy signs for villages, but then saw almost nothing of the villages
+from the road; the sign for Dubna is a massive steel thing with
+\acro{DUBNA} in 3-\acro{D} steel letters supported on wires.
+
+Checking into the hotel was simple; we were given little chits for
+each day's breakfast, and room keys with convenient bottle-openers
+attached. The meal in the hotel wasn't exactly exciting, but the
+\CyrTUG\ contingent invited us for tea (in the Russian style)
+afterwards; we had arrived, and were feeling welcome already.
+
+\section*{The meeting location\Dash \acro{JINR}}
+
+The Joint Institute for Nuclear Research, where the meeting was to be
+held, is `pretty near' to the hotel, says Michel Goossens. Actually,
+by Westerners' standards, it's a fair walk. But the centre of Dubna
+is spaciously laid out in the middle of the forest, and the walk is
+quite pleasant. The contrast between the (relatively) modern
+buildings and the beautiful trees and flowers was striking indeed.
+
+There were 40\textsuperscript{th} anniversary celebrations going on,
+so that there were any number of brash posters around the town, and
+the hotel was teeming with Russian athletes (outnumbering the \TeX ies
+by a significant proportion: the town-centre hotel that we were in was
+too expensive for many of the Russian delegates).
+
+At the entrance to the Institute is a gate-house, manned by soldiers.
+On that first day, they were actually touting their automatic rifles,
+but later on they accepted that we would meekly do what we were
+instructed to do. They checked our passports, and lengthily,
+laboriously, checked that we were indeed in the list of people to be
+allowed in without benefit of official passes. We were taken to the
+\acro{LCTA}\footnote{Laboratory of Computer Techniques and Automation}
+building where the meeting was to happen, and climbed to the third
+floor (of seven) for our first \tug\ board meeting. After formally
+opening business, and agreeing an agenda, most of us were dragged off
+to Vladimir Korenkov's office to be interviewed by local \acro{TV}. I
+had determined to be brief (I didn't have much of a voice at the
+time), but Michel and Korenkov spoke for what seemed an unconscionably
+long time (in Russian). How much of this interminable interview made
+it to air I don't know: I would like to think my small contribution
+made it, because I was wearing my research group's \acro{T}-shirt\dots
+
+For lunch, we went to the Institute's canteen, and learnt how the
+other half live: the food wasn't terribly classy, but it was extremely
+cheap (when the conference proper started, we had a separate area with
+a fixed menu: we weren't told how much this cost).
+
+Dubna is on the banks of the Volga (it's actually near the confluence
+of the Dubna river with the Volga, and takes its name from the smaller
+river). On the Friday evening we had dinner in the hotel and wandered
+off to watch the sun setting over the river; we then discovered the
+intriguing Pelikan bar\Dash a plastic tent with a refrigerator and a
+rather loud hi-fi system; it was the nearest place we discovered that
+sold Russian (as opposed to imported) beer.
+
+\section*{The Conference}
+
+Our Saturday was spent mostly indoors, in board meetings, eating, and
+variously milling around. Then, in the early evening registration
+started, and we received our pack of conference stuff, including a
+\tug'96 mug, with that curious accordion-playing Russian lion on it.
+No \acro{T}-shirts on offer, though: we're told that Russians don't go
+for them, and so they didn't occur to the organising committee.
+
+Once registration was well under way, there was a little tea-party.
+Russians say (we're told) ``you can have too much Vodka; you can't
+have enough tea''. The Russian method of preparing tea grows on
+one\Dash I might even feel moved to use it myself: the Samovar is a
+much simpler object than I'd ever imagined, and can easily be
+substituted by a simple kettle. After tea, we continue the board
+meeting by the Volga, amid crowds of people enjoying the evening
+sunshine.
+
+On Sunday morning, we have the ``opening ceremony'' of the conference.
+This consists of a series of grand speeches (many of them in Russian,
+translated for us ignorant foreigners). We had an intriguing history
+(in English) of the institute, which was curiously old-fashioned in
+tone ``the biggest \dots\ the first \dots\ the highest flux \dots{}''\@.
+The fuel rods in one of their reactors stay there for 10~years!
+
+In this abbreviated account, only a few of the more striking papers
+get covered\dots
+\begin{itemize}
+\itemsep=0.1\itemsep
+\item Yannis Haralambous gave us one of his perorations, this time on
+ ligatures in Arabic. Yannis is \emph{so} erudite, but when he goes
+ off on one of these tacks about the \ae{}sthetics of typesetting
+ it's hard to keep up with him (though I find him totally fascinating).
+%
+\item Karel Piska (who says he's a sort of ``collector of alphabets'')
+ spoke about the usage of Cyrillic alphabets, the paths through which
+ they came to it, and the problems that arise from their slightly
+ different treatment of the alphabet itself.
+%
+\item Sergei Znamenskii discussed the issues arising from the different
+ standard encodings in use for Cyrillic throughout Russia. This was a
+ repeating issue for the conference; how does one exchange
+ information between systems, given that there are all these
+ different encodings in use. The normal ones are \acro{KOI}-8 (the
+ `8' being pronounced in Russian as `vosyem': a standard from the
+ `old days'), \acro{ISO}~8859-5, and two Microsoft code pages.
+ Reading a file written in one code as if it were in another can
+ often produce a \emph{partly} sensible result, but it's obviously
+ never going to be acceptable.
+%
+\item J\"org Knappen spoke on his latest version of the \acro{DC}
+ fonts, pushing his message of stability in advance of the release of
+ the final `\acro{EC}' version\footnote{Which has since been
+ released}. He also discussed the text companion fonts, which
+ contain symbols whose appearance should reasonably change to match
+ the surrounding text font. J\"org requested samples for additional
+ symbols for these \acro{TC} fonts.
+%
+\item J\"org also presented Fukui Rei's paper on the new \acro{TIPA}
+ phonetic fonts: an impressive piece of work, with accompanying
+ macros that permit straightforward use. Rei's encoding has been
+ adopted as a \LaTeX{} standard (\acro{T}3).
+%
+\item Olga Lapko spoke about the encoding problems that confront the
+ font-designer who aims to support Cyrillic; the background to the
+ problem is the vast range of languages that Cyrillic covers, another
+ aspect of the subject that Karel Piska was addressing.
+\end{itemize}
+
+\section*{Monday, and how not to chair a session}
+
+Monday was the one appearance I made on the podium. This could have
+been difficult (I had no voice) but I could make myself understood by
+using the microphone. The session was thrown into complete
+confusion because I had an incorrect version of the session timetable
+(I never found out why), with more time allowed for Yannis Haralambous
+(on his new fonts) and less allowed for Richard Kinch (on Unicode
+encoding issues) than either was expecting. So I had to extemporise a
+short discussion period at the end of the session, on encodings. This
+discussion didn't really get off the ground; I had noted several
+questions I wanted to ask of the morning's speakers, but no-one else
+(apparently) had done so. And when I had asked all my questions and
+had answers to them, the session (sort of) dried up\dots
+
+The afternoon was rounded off by the \acro{TUG} business
+meeting, at the start of which J\"org Knappen led
+a group of Russians out, to discuss the planned \LaTeX{}
+\acro{T}2 encoding for Cyrillic. (This was the one major question I
+had failed to get under way in my extempore discussion session.)
+Michel's presentation seemed to go down reasonably well with the
+members, and there was some discussion, but it was curtailed by an
+urgent summons to the canteen for dinner.
+
+And so back to the hotel, whence to the Pelikan for a beer to drink by
+the banks of the Volga, finding and skimming stones (there are rather
+few stones of any sort, let along flat ones, since it's not a sea
+shore, for all its sandiness). And when the sun's set too far to
+continue, back to the Pelikan to sit with a group of other delegates,
+drink a final beer, and shout conversations over the loud music and to
+the accompaniment of a drunken dancer who occasionally lunged at
+people in a sort of conversational way (and invariably missed).
+
+\section*{Sergiev Posad\Dash the \emph{big trip}}
+
+Tuesday morning's session was short (\emph{and} I was late for it,
+having been told the first speaker hadn't arrived). Laurent Siebenman
+was speaking when I arrived about the concept of using \acro{DVI} as a
+document distribution medium, but of course I missed some of his
+reasoning. I'm sceptical.
+
+Then off to a slightly-hurried early lunch and thence to Sergiev Posad
+by bus. It's a major centre of the Russian Orthodox Church, including
+a monastery, a seminary, etc. Our tour took in three `cathedrals' and
+a museum which included some beautiful illuminated manuscript books.
+
+Our journey back was far from smooth\Dash a startlingly loud puncture
+delaayed us for ages. But when we got back to the hotel, we found
+that a call has gone ahead of us to \acro{JINR}, and our dinner has
+been put in huge pots and brought to the hotel. We ate it as a picnic
+on a bit of meadow land between the hotel and the Volga.
+
+\section*{And how do you follow that?}
+
+The Wednesday morning started with \emph{two} papers from Kees van der
+Laan: I never know what to make of this man\dots
+
+The first paper is on how to do (what seem to me) trivial graphics in
+\TeX{} (native) using the good old `turtle' model. This is fun, but
+isn't taking us anywhere much: who gets to using \TeX{} when they're
+still of an age to need turtle graphics? (Native) graphics in \TeX{}
+\emph{are} a problem, but there are reasonable solutions in a variety
+of areas, and almost anyone nowadays will go to encapsulated
+PostScript for anything of any significance.
+
+Kees' second paper develops from one single idea: that of doing \MF{}
+(or \MP) graphics in three dimensions and imposing a projection
+transformation at a late stage. This is neat, but he doesn't seem to
+be thinking of anything but decorative effects.
+
+The rest of the morning (after the coffee break) is taken up with two
+new \acro{PDF}-related projects. The first presentation, of
+\TeXtoPDF\footnote{See the paper elsewhere in this issue} is by Petr
+Sojka. \TeXtoPDF{} provides an alternative
+output mechanism (as a change file on the sources) which creates
+\acro{PDF} output in place of \acro{DVI}. This is, of course, the
+\emph{right way} to do a hypertext-ish output; hypertext inevitably
+suffers from the same problems of context as the colour package, which
+we're familiar with from David Carlisle's accounts. Knuth spoke at
+\acro{TUG}'95 of his surprise that so few people have used \TeX{} as
+the basis for radical modification; Sojka has taken him at his word,
+and it was pleasing to hear that Knuth had approved of the work when
+he visited Brno earlier in 1996.
+
+The second presentation was from Sergei Lesenko, who is the original
+author of the partial Type~1 font downloading code that appears in the
+latest alpha-test \textsf{dvips}. Lesenko is developing a
+\textsf{dvi2pdf}, based on the code of \textsf{dvips}. As I
+explained above, this isn't \emph{really} the `right' way to do the job
+(any more than the established
+\TeX\dash\textsf{dvips}\dash\textsf{repere}\dash\textsf{Distiller}),
+but one can imagine it `catching on' more quickly than
+\TeXtoPDF, simply because of the world's entirely justifiable
+reliance on the stability of \TeX{} itself.
+
+Neither of these projects is complete, and neither could be accepted
+with their present specifications even if complete:
+\begin{itemize}
+\itemsep=0.25\itemsep
+\item the precise nature of Sojka and Thanh's new primitives wasn't
+ clear, but what \emph{was} clear didn't please many, and
+\item Lesenko's \cmd\special\ commands don't conform to the
+ Hyper\TeX{} conventions, nor does their syntax look like that
+ defined by the \acro{TWG} on device driver standards.
+\end{itemize}
+Nevertheless, I take heart from the fact that substantial new projects
+continue to spring up in our cosy little \TeX\ world!
+
+In the afternoon we had a trip to a neighbouring town called
+Kimri, to visit the town museum.
+The bus again collected us from the institute, but by the time we
+arrived at the gate, the rain was beginning to be serious, and we had
+to get out and file through the gate-house so that the bus could be
+`checked' (an operation that, naturally, took rather little
+time\nobreak\dots\unskip\@).
+The road took us out of Dubna \emph{under} the Moscow-Volga
+canal, past an enormous statue of Lenin and then along the top of the
+dam that makes the ``man-made (Moscow) sea'' which (as I understand
+it) is on the Volga. By the time we arrived at Kimri, getting from
+bus to museum was an occasion to sprint through huge puddles.
+
+%The museum itself is intriguing (to me at least). It starts with an
+%account of the earliest finds from the region, of ice-age fauna, with
+%Mammoth jaw bones, stuffed beaver and the like, stone tools, etc. Then we
+%have a series of vignettes of local life, the earlier ones developed
+%from archaeological finds, the later ones from historical sources. At
+%some stage, Kimri became a big centre of the shoe trade, and was the
+%site of a huge fair to which merchants came from all over Russia.
+%These vignettes cover a bewildering array of dates up to c19., when
+%they slow down for the ``patriotic war of 1812'' (against Napoleon's
+%armies) before galloping on to the lead-up to 1917 and the civil war.
+%Then vignettes of domestic life in the 20s and 30s before a
+%heart-rending account of the town's experience of the ``great
+%patriotic war against fascism'', during which the town was bombed but
+%not occupied (the town's population at the time was 30\,000; there
+%were 12\,000 casualties).
+
+%The final cultural display was of Tupolev, who was a local man (which
+%explains the model of the ill-fated Tu-144 in the foyer), and then
+%there was a room of wild-life. (I seemed to recognise more of the birds
+%than did the locals\dots)
+
+On the way back to the institute for dinner, the weather is more
+terrible still. The bus driver agreed to wait (for no longer than
+20~minutes) while we ate our meal, which meant that we got a lot less
+wet than we might otherwise expect. The guards weren't playing: we
+had to get out and show our passes and passports, filing through the
+pouring rain, on the way in, and again on the way out. The brilliant
+arrangement this time was to spend significant time `checking' the
+bus, so that the guard house became packed and the (real) workers at
+the institute couldn't go home from work on their
+bicycles.
+
+So to the hotel, and to Irina Makhovaya's birthday party in her hotel room.
+Wow!\Dash food, drink, toasts, all flowing freely until (after three
+hours) tea arrived with the inevitable Samovar. Lots of tea and then
+dancing, until (at midnight) someone said we shouldn't have music in
+the hotel after 11\,p.m. So out to dance in the open air to the sound
+of the tape player in Professor Pankratiev's car. Until about
+1.30\,a.m., when the
+military police arrived: they wanted to impound the car and arrest the
+Professor. A slight dampener on the enthusiasm for dancing (Richard
+Kinch disappeared into the undergrowth), but the Russian women present
+pled with the police (in relays). Eventually the word came that we
+are to move the car about 5\,metres back so that it's \emph{this} side
+of the `No entry' sign\dots\ and a little while later, Pankratiev was
+no longer in jeopardy. Eventually the police go away (and Richard
+reappears!). When I left (after 2\,a.m.), the dancing was still in
+full swing; I've demonstrated to myself that even free-flowing Vodka
+doesn't make me a competent dancer!
+
+\section*{The last day}
+
+The conference itself was scheduled to finish on Thursday
+1\textsuperscript{st}; the morning session was to be papers (as
+normal), then a closing ceremony.
+
+Andrei Slepukhin swapped places with Kees van der Laan, so that Yannis
+Haralambous (who was leaving early) could hear Slepukhin's ideas on
+multilingual processing. Slepukhin may have a point, but if he does,
+he seems me to miss it himself; on the whole, I need to read a paper
+(there wasn't one, even in the pre-prints). Michel Goossens re-did
+(and still further extended) his talk about
+\LaTeX{}\ensuremath{\leftrightarrow}\acro{HTML}.
+
+Then after coffee Kees van der Laan (again) talked about his \acro{BLU}e's
+format; Kees is a polished presenter, but I remain unconvinced. More
+unconvincing still was Astrelin, who was (as far as one could tell)
+talking about a \acro{C}++ class library implementing a few rather
+trivial graphics functions together with some serious unresolved
+research issues. Until Pankratiev\footnote{Whose talk came as a
+ surprise, as it too hadn't made it to my copy of the programme}
+spoke a little later, there was no context whatever for Astrelin's
+work; Pankratiev's project is putting together a standard harness for
+the use of \TeX{} throughout Russia, and Astrelin's work is a small
+part of it. Between Astrelin and Pankratiev, though, was another
+piece of solid down-to-earth stuff from Berdnikov's group\Dash not
+exactly earth-shattering, but plainly addressing real needs of their
+user community. I was impressed by all three papers that came
+out of Berdnikov's group.
+
+Then we had our closing ceremony. We had asked for nominations for
+the Cathy Booth prize, on the basis of ``what would affect your work
+most in the next year''. I was sure that either Sojka
+or Lesenko should get the prize; in the event Lesenko's showing was
+poor, while Sojka was the clear winner. However,
+since Sojka had a prize last year, and since the prizes we had on
+offer were rather
+infra-dig for him anyway (for example, as president of \acro{CS}-\tug, he
+gets that group's complimentary copy of \BV), he accepted the prize on
+behalf of his student Han The Thanh. The top prize awarded by
+\tug\ was to Berdnikov as representative of his group. Well-deserved,
+as I said; solid down-to-earth work. \CyrTUG\ gave Michel Goossens a
+big book (presumably about Russia\Dash all I could see was that it was
+in Russian).
+
+Then after another rather rapid lunch we went off to the bank of the
+Volga, just up the path from the hotel, to catch the boat for our
+picnic trip. Beautiful weather, the sort of boat that plies many a
+Western river with a lot more passengers, so one could walk around and
+talk without inconveniencing one's fellows, and a leisurely trip up
+the Volga to somewhere that wasn't identified (to me, at least), where
+we turned around and sailed back down again. It's hard to give a
+clear picture of this trip. I took a lot of photographs of the
+assembled \TeX{}ies; Olga Grineva (of Berdnikov's group) went round
+and collected signatures from every participant on the back of her
+copy of the group photograph of the conference.
+
+Two things, off our boat, stick in the mind. The first is the perfectly
+ordinary idyll of a camp-site in amongst the trees on the banks of the
+river; people enjoying a holiday, with a canoe and a perfect beach to
+swim from. The second is the totally incomprehensible old man who was
+wandering around a vast barge as it chugged along in the opposite
+direction to us, stopping from time to time at one or
+the other of the piles of sand on the barge and tipping a shovelful of
+the sand into the river.
+
+And eventually we had come back to the confluence of the Dubna river
+with the Volga, where we turned up the Dubna for a short way to a
+picnic site at Ratmino. A fantastic spread was set out for us\Dash
+food a-plenty and masses of booze. We all tuck in, and then realise
+that they've got huge barbecues running, and we're being offered
+shashliki\Dash huge metal skewers with giant lumps of lamb on them.
+Of \emph{course} there was a speech or two, and as a result there were
+toasts. We only had plastic mugs to toast with, and they don't
+`chink'\dots A small group struck up folk singing, others just talked
+and enjoyed the early evening.
+
+%Back on the boat, I realised I hadn't taken my lunch-time
+%anti-inflammatory~\dots\ and now it was 2030! \emph{That's} why I was
+%aching so much\Dash I could hardly bring myself to dance (although I
+%presented an almost-synchronised stumble towards the end of the
+%evening, just before we reached the pier back in Dubna). So I retired
+%to my room to write up my diary, and watched as a thunderstorm broke
+%to finish off a day of otherwise perfect weather.
+
+\section*{Moscow, and the end of the party}
+
+Friday was a trip to Moscow which combined a tour with dropping people
+off for their travel home. The bus turned off into Sheremetevo (2:
+the international airport), and we said good bye to the first bunch.
+Then we went into the centre of the city and met a guide, strikingly
+dressed to look like a cross between a cartoon bee and a
+Latin-American slinky dancer. We went to Red Square, and observed the
+outside of Lenin's mausoleum, of St.\ Basil's (extraordinary)
+Cathedral and, of course, the Kremlin. Then back to the bus and a
+long drive around the city, where we were for ever seeing `panoramas'
+of this, that or the other. There were striking things in all this,
+like the cathedral being rebuilt in the shell of the swimming pool
+that replaced the original cathedral on the site, and like the
+beautiful old houses that have survived since the rebuilding of the
+city after Napoleon's devastation in 1812.
+
+After a stop at a touristy-shop, we climbed the Lenin Hills (the
+promontory on which Moscow University stands), dropped a few people
+off, and then stopped for what I would call a
+\emph{real} panorama of the city. The ski-jumps up here are (strangely) on
+the itinerary of newly-weds, who climb the rickety iron steps in their
+finery to look out over city from a better vantage point still. Then
+on to the war memorial that was dedicated in 1995 in remembrance of
+the of the 1941--45 war. This is a most astounding piece of
+architecture, achieving a dignity that one doesn't, somehow, expect.
+The arrays of fountains were spectacular; the singing in the memorial
+church was wonderful, the sculpture was striking. I loved it.
+
+But at the end of that little tour, the party started breaking up in
+earnest, and within the hour there was almost no-one left on the bus.
+
+\end{Article}