Mar20 TUG news: conferences, TUGboat, TeX Live pretest, Book Club of California

[TeX Users Group]

Dear TeXers!

I hope the extra day in February helped you with the backlog.

The deadlines for TUG2020 (https://tug.org/tug2020/) are approaching
fast.  Do not forget to register for the conference and book your room
in the hotel! And sign up for the calligraphy workshop if so inclined --
a few spots are left.
Deadline for TUG20 proposals: April 10.
Deadline for bursary (financial assistance) applications: April 15.

Another conference with deadlines approaching fast is BachoTeX
(http://gust.org.pl/bachotex/2020-en).  The abstract submission is
till March 22, and the early bird registration is until March 31.

There is an interesting conference on grapholinguistics in Paris,
June 17-19. Extended description:
  https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb41-1/tb127haralambous-grapholinguistics.pdf
Conference page:
  https://grafematik2020.sciencesconf.org/

Speaking of deadlines, March 31 is the deadline for submissions to
TUGboat, https://tug.org/TUGboat.

In other news: TeXLive 2020 is close to the pretest: in a day or two,
please take a look at https://tug.org/texlive/pretest.html if you want
to help the TeX community by testing the new release. It is installed
independently of any other TeX versions.

In previous newsletters I wrote about an exposition at the
Book Club of California on the history of TeX. If you happen to be near
San Francisco, you may want to browse it, as well as the great Book Club
library open to the general public at 312 Sutter Street. More info:
  https://www.bccbooks.org/

New CTAN packages in February:
- brandeis-thesis, a class for Brandeis University M.A. theses;
- emoji, emoji support in (Lua)LaTeX;
- etbb, an extension of Edward Tufte's ET-Bembo family;
- euclideangeometry, draw geometrical constructions;
- fewerfloatpages, reduce the number of unnecessary float pages;
- fontsize, a small package to set arbitrary sizes for the main font of
  the document;
- haranoaji & haranoaji-extra, Harano Aji Fonts;
- hitszthesis, a bachelor dissertation template for Harbin Institute of
  Technology, ShenZhen;
- leiletter, a letter class for Leiden University;
- lie-hasse, draw Hasse diagrams;
- metastr, store and compose strings;
- mpfonts, Computer Modern Type 3 fonts converted using MetaPost;
- noto-emoji, Noto Emoji fonts;
- optex, a LuaTeX format based on Plain TeX and OPmac;
- pdfpc, define data for the pdfpc presentation viewer;
- schulmathematik, commands and document classes for German-speaking
  teachers of mathematics and physics;
- texlive-dummy-enterprise-linux-8, dummy TeX Live RPM for use with RHEL8
  and derived distributions;
- twemoji-colr, wemoji font in COLR/CPAL layered format.
-- 
Good luck

-Boris