Jul23 news: Farewell, meetings, books new and old, jobs, holidays, ctan

[TeX Users Group]

Dear TeXers!

This is my last newsletter as the TUG President:  the next one will be
written by Arthur, as my terms ends at the AGM during TUG 2023.  Over this
time I wrote 70 newsletters and 12 TUGboat columns.  I am grateful to
you for allowing me to virtually visit you and tell what I thought was
interesting and important.

Serving as a TUG President is an interesting and sometimes humbling
experience.  Sometimes you can easily make the changes you want,
sometimes it is much less smooth, and sometimes you get stuck.  I hope
my mistakes were not too egregious, and my newsletters and columns
were neither too boring nor too flashy.

I would not be able to do this if not for the help of the Board.
Thank you all for your lessons and kindness.  I am especially thankful
to Arthur, who served as a vice-president all these years, to Barbara,
who tirelessly edited all my texts and kept TUB a great journal, to
Karl, who took many duties and has been the backbone of TUG, and to
Robin, who worked well above and beyond her official duties.  Thank
you, and thank you, all other board members and the great community
we have.  Speaking of the latter, our community, as seen on the
mailing lists and Stack Exchange, is, in my opinion, one of the most
kind and helpful ones in the technical blogosphere.  It was a pleasure
and a source of pride for me to represent it.

I wish Arthur the best of luck and will do all I can to help him in
his new role.

While stepping down as the TUG President, I am not leaving the TUG
service.  I have been elected to the Board, and hope to be useful for
the community in this position.

I hope to see many of you at TUG 2023, which starts in less than a
fortnight, preceded by the DANTE e.V., 65. annual meeting.  The next
important event is the 17th ConTeXt Meeting: Sib\v{r}ina, Czech Republic,
Sept. 10-16, 2023 (https://meeting.contextgarden.net/2023/).

An addition to our books page: John D Lamb reviewed the recently
published third edition of The LaTeX Companion, by Frank Mittelbach
with Ulrike Fischer:
  https://tug.org/books/reviews/tb137reviews-mittelbach-tlc.html
The book itself can be ordered with a discount using the following url:
  https://tug.org/l/tlc3

In other book news, Stefan Kottwitz has published a new book:
"LaTeX Graphics with TikZ: A practitioner's guide to drawing 2D and 3D
images, diagrams, charts, and plots":
  https://www.packtpub.com/product/latex-graphics-with-tikz/9781804618233
We plan to publish a review soon.

In the department of very old books, the curators at the University of
Graz (Austria) recently discovered that an Egyptian papyrus from the 3rd
century BCE had stitching traces indicating it was part of a codex
rather than a scroll.  It is now believed to be the oldest known
codex.  It is digitized and publicly available; see:
  https://mummybook.uni-graz.at/en/

Speaking of newer (but still sometimes old) books, Nelson Beebe
reports a recently uncovered large Bell Labs bibliography about Unix
spanning 1972 to 1980.  It is available at
https://www.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/bib/unix.bib. There is a SQLite3
version of the bibliography at
https://www.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/bib/unix.db.  See
https://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/talks/#2009 for the documentation of
this format.

Some time ago we noted that arXiv is hiring TeXnicians on different
levels of seniority.  The positions seem to be open still; see:
  https://info.arxiv.org/hiring/.

July 4 is the national holiday in the US.  My congratulations to the
US TeXers!

New CTAN packages in June:
- antique-spanish-units, a short document about antique spanish units;
- beautybook, a beautiful book template for maths and science;
- examz, randomized exams with multiple versions;
- javascripthttp, add buttons to a PDF to easily get and post web content;
- jourrr, a LaTeX template for journal rebuttal letters;
- luahttp, uses Lua to generate interactive PDF documents;
- mitthesis, a LaTeX template for MIT theses;
- mlawriter, write MLA style documents in Plain TeX;
- postit, a LaTeX package for displaying Post-it notes;
- profmaquette, use exercises in different types of documents;
- profsio, commands (with TikZ) to work with french "BTS SIO math's themes";
- quizztex, create quizzes like in TV shows;
- rorlink, create ROR symbols which link to the given ROR-IDs;
- rouequestions, draw a "question wheel" (roue de questions);
- string-diagrams, create string diagrams with LaTeX and TikZ;
- tilings, a TikZ library for drawing tiles and tilings.

Happy TeXing!
Boris Veytsman, TUG President