Feb22 TUG news: happy new year, gutenberg bible, accessibility, ar5iv, tugboat, ctan

[TeX Users Group]

Dear TeXers,

February 1 is the Lunar New Year 2022, the most important date in the
traditional Chinese calendar.  I congratulate all TeXers who celebrate
it and wish us all a happy and fruitful Year of the Tiger.

While the life in many countries is slowly going back to normal, new
variants of virus sometimes shut down or severely limit theaters,
museums and libraries. This makes virtual museums especially important.
I have spent hours enjoying digital exhibitions, and would like to share
with you one of them: the Yale University Library has digitized their
copy of the Gutenberg Bible; take a look at:
  https://hdl.handle.net/10079/bibid/3391099

In other news, the TeX Live team has reissued the HTML version of the manual:
  https://tug.org/texlive/doc/texlive-en/texlive-en.html
This version, thanks to the new features of tex4ht, is compliant with
accessibility guidelines. Therefore TeX Live is now fully compliant with
US and EU accessibility requirements, which is reflected in the updated
VPAT statement at https://ctan.org/pkg/tex-vpat.  And, by the way,
we encourage releasing updates to packages and programs before the
TeX Live pretest starts later this month (https://tug.org/texlive/).

The easy creation of accessible documents with TeX is an ongoing task.
While tex4ht helps to create accessible HTML, the efforts of the LaTeX3
team make the direct creation of accessible PDF come closer. For those
interested in reading, testing, or otherwise contributing, see
the PDF Accessibility TeXnical Working Group web page:
  https://tug.org/twg/accessibility/

Speaking of output formats, the LaTeXML project offers another way to
create accessible output.  Recently it announced a huge breakthrough
(https://twitter.com/dginev/status/1488157927001268231):
https://ar5iv.org.  It is a great preview site, automatically
converting arXiv preprints into HTML5 (just replace X with 5 in a url).
LaTeXML is available from:
  https://math.nist.gov/~BMiller/LaTeXML/
It is a difficult technical problem to include it in TeX Live, but
perhaps that will happen at some point.

On another front, we have started planning for the TUG'22 conference. It
will again be wholly online, and take place from July 22-24. More
details will be forthcoming, but early submissions are welcome; the
conference committee can be reached at tug2022 at tug.org. Nothing much on
the web yet, but updates will happen here (as usual):
  https://tug.org/tug2022/

TUGboat: the deadline for the next (regular) issue is March 31. Your
submissions on all things about TeX and typesetting are welcome. The
instructions for authors are available at
  https://tug.org/TUGboat/location.html

In TUG news, if your membership includes automatic renewal, it is
probably renewed by now.  If it is not, it is a good time to check
that you did not forget to renew. You can log in to the TUG members area
to check your current status:
  https://tug.org/members/
And you can renew at:
  https://tug.org/renew/
This year our membership forms use PayPal by default: it is faster and
less expensive for us. However, if you cannot or do not want to use
PayPal, the usual form we've used in the past is available at:
  https://tug.org/forms/current/memberalt.html
Please use whichever is better for you.

CTAN packages in January:
- altsubsup, subscripts and superscripts with square brackets;
- biblatex-readbbl, read a .bbl file created by biber;
- bmstu, a LaTeX class for Bauman Moscow State Technical University;
- citation-style-language, bibliography formatting with the
  XML-based Citation Style Language;
- concmath-otf, Concrete-based OpenType math font;
- coop-writing, support for cooperative writing and editorial comments;
- dbshow, store and display data with custom filters, orders, styles;
- hamnosys, a font for sign languages;
- kanbun, typeset kanbun-kundoku with support for kanbun annotation;
- latex-lab-dev, LaTeX laboratory: Development pre-release;
- llncs, document class and bibliography for Springer Lecture Notes in
  Computer Science (LNCS);
- pascaltriangle, draw beautiful Pascal (Yanghui) triangles;
- pgf-interference, drawing interference patterns with PGF/TikZ;
- sillypage, John Cleese's Silly Walk as page numbering style;
- texlogfilter, filter LaTeX engines' output or log file;
- yb-book, template for YB-branded books.

Happy TeXing!
Boris Veytsman, TUG President