path: root/info/digests/texline/no8/rept.tex

%Carol Hewlett's report on UK TUG, held at Nottingham University on
% 4 November 1988.
%
\centerline{\bf UK \TeX\ Users' Group}
\medskip
\noindent
The Inaugural Meeting of the UK \TeX\ Users' Group was held at the
University of Nottingham, on 4 November 1988.
\smallskip
\leftline{Summary of Papers:}
\par
\noindent{\it\MFsl\ ---\ An Overview: Charles Curran, Oxford University}

\noindent
Charles Curran started out by asking What is \MF? He then proceeded to give
some reasons why it might be used: 
\item{1}  to design `odd characters', but not usually a whole
fount;
\item{2}  there were problems with
different device drivers and these
could be cured via \MF\ by altering the device
parameters for various printers,
particularly with reference to the write-white versus write-black enigma;
\item{3} sometimes defective characters needed redesigning. 

\noindent
He said that existing characters can often be adapted;
he suggested people speak to Dominik Wujastyk if they needed to get founts for
alphabets other than european.
He then showed diagrammatically the relationship between \MF\ and \TeX\ and
the various ouput files, some of which should be tuned to the desired output
device.
Various implementations of \MF\ exist, running on {\sc vms}, {\sc sun} and
Macintosh.  Some have preview capability.

Charles said that \MF\ can be used to
generate Computer Modern fonts at various
resolutions\slash magnifications; to generate device-specific fonts by modifying
e.g., |waits.mf|, |local.mf|; and to generate odd characters.

It was possible that there was a need for a UK \MF\ group, although the 
r\^ole of answering \MF\ problems was currently dealt with by newsletters
and bulletin boards.

Charles then made a number of general points about the matching of founts
to page-printers. It was not generally known which print engine
was used in which page-printer (and it could be very difficult to find out).
Further, the average user (or implementer) didn't always know
how a fount {\it should} look and whether
what was being produced was the best possible. This suggested another
area for the exchange of information: information on page-printers and their
print engines and examples of the best possible printing that could be
achieved with any given machine. Another field for discussion/education
was that of type design in general.

In the discussion that followed Charles' paper, it was suggested that
a sample book be put together. The relationship (if that's the right
word) between \MF\ and \PS\ was mentioned: will \PS\ take over
all that \MF\ now does?
Finally it was pointed out that while \MF\ can be used to design {\it families},
programs like Fontographer were good for single characters but needed a
lot of work to retain any consistency when designing more than a few
characters.
\medskip
\noindent{\it Installing \TeX\ --- the scenic route: David Osborne, Nottingham
University}

\noindent
David Osborne's paper had a subtitle --- the long road to implementing \TeX.
At Nottingham, several years had been spent in trying to provide a \TeX\
user service. David explained that they had
originally obtained a \WEB\ source
for their VAX machines. \WEB\ contains both the program source and
its documentation. The code is run through a program called \Tangle, which
gives Pascal program output and documentation separately; the documentation
file then goes through \Weave\ to produce the real documentation and the Pascal
compiler is used to produce the \TeX\ executable program. \Tangle\ needs to
read a system-specific change file as well as \WEB.

There was lots of documentation, but very little help as to where to start 
reading it. However, most of these problems were solved reasonably quickly.
The real difficulty came when trying to fix the printer for \TeX. That 
particular problem had still not been solved, although they were now  
considering an AGFA PostScript page-printer, which promised a reasonable 
printing speed and for which a \TeX-\PS\ driver could be used.

He summed up by giving three points which new implementers of \TeX\ should
follow:
\item{$\bullet$} Choose the output device {\it first\/}.
\item{$\bullet$} Allow plenty of time for the implementers to become familiar with
the package and documentation.
\item{$\bullet$} Allow plenty of time for the implementation

\noindent
David further suggested that better documentation directed at implementers
was needed; and that there were implications for training both users
and those who would advise them.
\medskip
\noindent{\it An Introduction to \LaTeX: Sue Brooks, Bradford University
Software Services Limited}

\noindent
Sue Brooks gave a very persuasive talk about the benefits of using \LaTeX.
She set out a number of questions that were asked and told us her answers.

First, what was \LaTeX? It was a macro package that was somewhat similar to
Scribe (which was itself like Troff). The assumption was made that a 
document had a structure; additionally, \LaTeX\ was able to handle book-like
items like table of contents.

Second, why use \LaTeX? Because it uses a document model rather than a
page description, as |plain|
 \TeX\ did. It also included certain other sets
of macros, namely \BibTeX\ and \SliTeX. Sue compared \LaTeX\ to DTP packages
where she felt that \LaTeX\ won hands down.

Third, why did Sue use \LaTeX? Partly this was historical --- she had learned
\LaTeX\ while at the Open University. She still felt that it was the best
way for her to do her current publishing work. It provided a user service,
without the need for the user to write macros.

Fourth, who would benefit from using it? Authors (especially when
collaborating), authors' minions and documentation producers.

Fifth, what was wrong with \LaTeX? For a start, it was too structured; the
style files were not fully understood (except by Leslie Lamport?) and there
was no good {\it reference} manual (although the `User's Manual' was fine).
But there was no alternative, either!

Next, Sue said that \LaTeX\ was certainly not going to disappear, but there
were a number of things that would improve it, especially for the UK. In 
particular, the distribution needed sorting out; more information should be
available on the implementation details and  style files. There should be
a |doc| to |sty| convertor and English hyphenation.

Finally, to ease the user's burden, Sue suggested: good editing interfaces,
\LaTeX-intelligent spelling checkers, indexing tools, \BibTeX, \SliTeX\ and
its fonts, and style files.
\medskip
\noindent{\it TUG, Montr\'eal 1988 Conference: Cathy~Booth, Exeter
University}

\noindent
Cathy's report   appears in full 
elsewhere in \TeXline.
\medskip
\noindent{\it\TeX\ in Germany: report from Freiburg Meeting:
Chris~Rowley, Open University}

\noindent
Chris opened his report by saying that there was a lot of \TeX\ going on
in W. Germany. \TeX\ does acknowledge that there are countries other than 
the US, so is welcomed by Germans. It seems to be widely used at the high-end
by commercial users. Among other things, there is work on fount design.
The meeting had held a `problem session', in which there was a discussion
of extensions to \TeX. A program of development for \TeX\ and \LaTeX\ was
proposed, for which 24 extensions were suggested.
\medskip
Sebastian~Rahtz (Southampton University)
was due to present a paper on Picture Languages, but as the proceedings 
were running late, it was omitted. Peter Abbott (Aston University) asked for
\TeX\ contributions for an issue of {\it University Computing}. He also
asked for volunteers to help with the task of checking over the Aston 
Archive to try to keep duplicated material to a minimum and to make sure
that what was there was up-to-date.
\medskip
\noindent{\it A UK TUG?: Malcolm Clark, Imperial College}

\noindent
Malcolm started by giving the meeting a pep talk, which he said was his
review of the world through \TeX-coloured glasses. He outlined the activities
of TUG, which included a newsletter, courses, annual conference, hotline
support (and email), products and a speakers bureau. He reminded the meeting
of the three electronic \TeX\ things --- \TeXhax, UK\TeX\ and the Aston
Archive. Malcolm noted the other European countries with \TeX\ groups of
various sorts, including \TeX interessen (W. Germany and Austria), Gutenberg
in France, a Dutch group, a Nordic grouping,
a \TeX-produced journal in Spain and also activity in Poland, Israel and Eire.
He listed the European \TeX\ meetings, in Italy in 1985, Strasbourg, 1986,
Exeter, 1988 and to come, Karslruhe/Freiburg or Stockholm in 1989 and Cork in 
1990. The last topic of his review was of other groups with an interest
in electronic typesetting --- the Electronic Publishing Specialist Group of
the British Computer Society, the British Computer Society's Displays
Group and the \sgml\ users' group.

It had been revealed to the meeting that Malcolm had been asked to be
the European co-ordinator for TUG. His next points were on the subject
of what we wanted from  TUG and what we could do. On the second point,
be believed that the big thing was to try to solve the ignorance factor.

\item{$\bullet$}we could produce a brief flyer to define \TeX; answer such
questions as  where can \dvi\ files be typeset; perhaps document and provide an
index to the other \LaTeX\ style files and exchange \hbox{information} on
implementing \TeX.

\item{$\bullet$}someone could make a map showing the interrelation between \WEB, 
\Weave, \Tangle, \TeX, Pascal, C, |gf|, |pk|, |pxl|, etc.

\item{$\bullet$}pronounciation could be standardised.

\item{$\bullet$}\TeX\ could be taught English hyphenation. (It was agreed that
Charles~Curran and Chris~Martin would investigate this area.)

\item{$\bullet$}perhaps even more use could be made of bulletin boards, electronic
mail and the Aston Archive.

\item{$\bullet$}workshops could be arranged on certain subjects, such as \MF\ type
design, macros, style files, graphics, etc.

\noindent
The rest of Malcolm's talk, group discussion and so forth was not so
structured. Although no conclusion was reached, there was much talk about
the relationship between any UK \TeX\ group and  TUG. It was suggested
that we could be a {\sc TUG} subgroup, such that a subscription to the UK
Group would also form a subscription to TUG itself.
Then UK subscribers could get `local' services and {TUG\sc boat}.
Alternately, could the
UK group merely collect subscriptions in sterling on behalf of TUG,
to save us from buying \$ drafts or using credit cards? How did Europe as
a whole fit in? The only conclusion reached was that there should be a
group of some sort concerned with \TeX\ that holds regular meetings. It
was agreed that there would be another meeeting to be held in London,
probably in March, after Malcolm got back from the US where he would have
found out more about what being European co-ordinator entailed.

Another subject that was raised from time to time was the fact that
the Nottingham conference had been arranged at short notice (about 3 weeks)
and was successful because those attending had been sent electronic mail 
over {\sc janet}. This gave University staff an advantage over commercial users.
It was established that commercial companies could have a
legitimate {\sc janet} address if they wished to communicate with the academic
community. They were not supposed to use {\sc janet} to communicate with other
commercial users. For the purposes of receiving UK\TeX, etc.,
provided mail boxes could be established,
there was no reason why commercial users should not be able to have
a {\sc janet} address.
It was suggested that universtity recipients of UK\TeX\ send one
(printed) copy to a non-email user.
 
The meeting ended with a very warm vote of thanks to David Osborne who made all
the local arrangements. 
\smallskip
\rightline{\sl Carol Hewlett}
\bigskip
\centerline{\bf A UK \TeX\ Users Group?}
\medskip\noindent
On Friday November 4th I had the pleasure of attending a meeting
organised in Nottingham for the purpose of discussing a possible
UK \TeX\  Users Group. The impetus for this came from the very successful
\TeX88 conference, one of an informal series of get-togethers for
European \TeX ies, coupled with the remarkable rise to power of the
UK's own \TeX\  Archive at Aston under the benign leadership of Peter
Abbott. David Osborne put together a colloquium at short notice in the
congenial surroundings  of the Cripps Computing
Centre, and about 40 people were able
to come. The problem with the short notice was that David perforce
used electronic mail to advertise the event, leading to a high
proportion of committed gurus present, not many dumb users and more or
less nobody from outside academia.

The day started officially at 11\,am. For some of us, this meant rising
at 5\,am, tripping over the cat and stumbling onto a train at 6\,am. Thank
god for British Rail egg and cress sandwiches. Anyway, at 11 or
thereabouts, Charles Curran from Oxford ambled onto the stage and
started talking about \MF. He claimed to have had his brief
changed 2 minutes before, but managed somehow to suggest that since
Computer Modern and \MF\ won't go away in the near future, and since the whole
situation of different printers and drivers is a mess, it would not do any harm
at all to have a UK group advising neophytes on which files to
sacrifice black cocks in front of (this apparently being the correct
way to get a good value for `blacker' in your |local.mf| file). Anyone
in the audience who still thought \TeX\  was something you bought off the
shelf at Safeway were then disillusioned by David Osborne's outline of
\TeX\  installation at Nottingham. While his problems revolved mainly
around printers, it was clear that the apparent `free' nature of \TeX\ 
is more than paid for by the arcane nature of the installation from a
raw tape. Again, it was clear that new people would benefit from
experience from a local group.

A breath of fresh air came from Sue Brooks (late of the OU, now in
commercial software documentation) with her unashamed plug for 
writers (as opposed to \TeX ies) to use Lamport's \LaTeX\  macros; she
gave a clear outline of the advantages and even some solutions to the
answers to problems. She was followed after a fine lunch by
Cathy Booth (Exeter) who told us about the \TeX\  Users Group meeting in
Montreal; the interest here was in its concentration on \TeX\  in 
real world production environments, which confirmed the impression
given in Seattle that \TeX\  has gone beyond implementation details (a
lesson the UK group could take on board?). Cathy also passed on some
gob-smacking gossip from commercial vendors about their new products. She was
followed by the most valuable talk (to me), a report by Chris Rowley (OU) on the
most recent German \TeX interessen meeting, in which he gave an impression of
what went on in German \TeX ery. Their work on customizing \TeX\  for German,
writing new books and listing the definite things a NEW\TeX\  should do, shows
up how lax we have been in the UK in simply accepting what the Americans give
us --- as was pointed out, we still lack English hyphenation
patterns. The Germans (and other European groups) seemed to be putting
more effort than the British into getting \LaTeX\  right, and this seemed
to be an area where progress could actually be expected.

I was scheduled to give a talk on picture languages in the afternoon,
but in the interests of discussion I agreed to be left out; Malcolm
Clark, the charismatic  Leaderene of \TeX88, and
editor of the prestigious \TeXline, then took the stage and
harangued the populace on the State of the World according to \TeX,
outlining what sources of information we had now in Europe and the UK,
what the \TeX\  Users Group does, and what we needed in the UK. It turned 
out that Malcolm had been unilaterally appointed European Coordinator 
for TUG, so he was able to promise 
a firm presentation of our desires to TUG. He outlined issues that
needed to be addressed, such as general ignorance in the world at
large about what \TeX\  was and how to get it, hyphenation problems,
teaching \TeX\  etc. Finally, we got around to the question of whether a
formal British group was needed, as opposed to simply sticking with
the main TUG or forming a pan-European group. Dissatisfaction over
what we got from TUG for the money prompted suggestions of an
autonomous group, while others wanted an affiliated chapter --- the
consensus seemed to me that we would like to join a UK version of TUG
which charged us a subscription, but sent most of it off to America
and joined TUG on our behalf, saving us bank charges etc., and
(hopefully) letting TUG ease administration and postage costs. Three
problems prevented a formal constitution being set up on the spot: a)
we did not know how TUG would react --- Malcolm would find this out in
January; b) nobody had tabled any suggestions, and it was getting
dark; c) we were not at all representative of UK \TeX\  users (i.e.~we were
mostly academic \TeX  bores). It was therefore decided to hold another
meeting in London in February, with wider invitations, when we would
formally set up a group (or not, as the meeting went!).

\TeX\  is hampered by its free image, to the same extent as it is aided
by its free image. Without commercial support, it can only exist if a
committed user group continues to keep its distribution and use at a
high standard. Ten years after the foundation of TUG, are cracks
showing? Will \TeX\  survive in the `real world'? Chaotic and inefficient
as it was (I did not see why a full meeting of users could not have
taken place later on without this initial peculiar subset), the
meeting in Nottingham was another valuable contribution to The Cause
of keeping the \TeX\  flame alight. Let us hope a UK group is successfully
formed.
\smallskip
\rightline{\sl Sebastian Rahtz}