[texhax] Feb18 TUG news: societies, in memoriam, practex'18, devfund, ctan

[TeX Users Group]

Dear TeXers,

The short month of February is upon us.  Our experiment with trial
membership, started in January, goes on: we have eleven trial members
(out of twenty new ones) so far.  If your friends and colleagues are
interested in TeX, typesetting and/or fonts, they might consider joining
TUG: https://tug.org/join.

Speaking of sister societies, I'd like to mention a couple of
organizations of interest to lovers of books and typesetting:
American Printing History Association (https://printinghistory.org/) and
Book Club of California (http://www.bccbooks.org/).  The latter is known
for its fine books printed in limited editions.  Some of these books
(Palatino: The Natural History of a Typeface by Robert Bringhurst and
The Noblest Roman: A History of the Centaur Types of Bruce Rogers by
Jerry Kelly and Misha Beletsky) have been reviewed in TUGboat (see
https://tug.org/books).  Last week these societies held two printing
events in San Francisco: the guests were allowed to print their own
broadsides.  There is a rare pleasure in operating a letter press and
looking at a brand new printed page coming out.

Some TUG news.  I am sorry to start with a sad announcement.  Staszek
Wawrykiewicz died in an accident recently.  He was an active member of
the community for many years, a friend and a man with a young and
generous heart.
http://www.gust.org.pl/news/r-i-p-staszek-wawrykiewicz-1
https://www.preining.info/blog/2018/02/in-memoriam-staszek-wawrykiewicz/

Meanwhile, we must go on.  The deadline for early bird registration for
Practical TeX 2018 (https://tug.org/practicaltex2018/) is May 1.  The
meeting will be in Troy, New York (near Albany).  Presentation proposals
are most welcome: https://tug.org/practicaltex2018/cfp.html.

The development fund committee (https://tug.org/tc/devfund) is pleased
to announce the first grant of 2018: Vafa Khalighi received funding for
his proposal to extend his bidi package (https://ctan.org/pkg/bidi) for
LuaTeX.

CTAN has a bunch of new graphics packages (among others:
https://ctan.org/ctan-ann), from making ladder diagrams to making
Sequential Functional Charts to drawing dart boards to support of
Adobe PSD to yet another package for Feynman diagrams.

We are looking forward for a very busy February!

Happy TeXing!

Boris Veytsman (TUG president)