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TUG 2002: Fonts, TeX, Indianisation, Kerala, etc...
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Received from CVR...
Radhakrishnan CV <cvr@river-valley.org>
TUG 2002: A Report from God's Own Country
By KG Kumar, Indian TeX Users Group
For the 33 delegates from 13 countries who gathered at Trivandrum,
the capital of the south Indian state of Kerala, for TUG 2002, the
ambience of the environs and the deliberations at the sessions only
served to reinforce this year's theme: Stand up and be proud of TeX!
To which, the local hosts, TUGIndia or the Indian TeX Users Group,
had added the teasing rider: After all, you are heading for God's Own
Country! That phrase may have seemed like marketing overkill for
most TeXies who had never before heard of Kerala, but the moment they
landed in Trivandrum -- or Thiruvananthapuram, to give the tongue-
twisting name of the city in the local language, Malayalam -- most
knew that this was some form of paradise. Especially when they first
glimpsed the idyllic setting of their place of temporary abode, Hotel
Samudra, at Kovalam, a seagull's wing-tip away from the rolling surf
of the Arabian sea.
Minds and bodies suitably relaxed after various trans-continental
flights, it only remained to see whether the sessions of the 23rd
Annual Meeting of TUG would live up to their promise, as advertised
in the pre-conference mailers and Web postings. Many of the delegates
had battled initial misgivings to travel to India, as several
countries had put out negative travel advisories, prompted by the
political tensions in the subcontinent. In fact, at one early point
in the run-up to the conference, there were strong doubts whether TUG
2002 would actually happen at all.
So it was with more than idle curiosity that the delegates trooped
into the airconditioned mini-bus on Wednesday, 4 September for the 40-
minute ride from Hotel Samudra to the Park Center, Technopark, the
modern, state-of-the-art electronics technology park that was to be
the venue for the three-day conference.
But most delegates were too busy taking in (and storing digitally!)
the sights of the green countryside they had to traverse, to bother
with syntax highlighting and server-side compilation! And when they
did land outside the Park Center, where they were joined by the other
delegates staying in a city hotel, most of whom had attended the pre-
conference tutorials from 1 to 3 September. Were they in for some
surprise! Waiting to greet them, all bedecked in a cape with the TUG
2002 logo, was a little elephant! Talk about life imitating art. Who
would have imagined the very Indian elephant on top of which Duane
Bibby's TeX lion and METAFONT lioness were happily perched would
actually be there in the flesh, gobbling bananas and swaying his
trunk in joy?! A couple of intrepid delegates clambered on top of the
elephant for a short ride, while most others remained content feeding
it bananas and taking snaps.
Also present to welcome the delegates was a team performing the
panchavadyam, Kerala's traditional five-instrument musical ensemble,
which built up to a crescendo as the delegates entered the Park
Center. Appropriately enough, a couple of the foreign male delegates
were clad in dhotis, the traditional sarong-like attire of Kerala,
while the odd lady did try out a salwar-kameez or a saree!
Day One
Suitably localised, the delegates were treated to a brief opening
ceremony at a session chaired by Sebastian Rahtz, before Ajit Ranade
of ABN-Amro Bank, Mumbai, India talked to them about the status of
TeX in India, where software contributes to 2 per cent of the
national Gross Domestic Product. He also pointed out that all 13 of
the Indic scripts can be typeset in TeX, but only 10 of the 5,000
fonts are free.
That set the tone for the next presentation by S. Rajkumar of
Linuxense Information Systems, Trivandrum, India, who talked about
the processing of Unicode text to produce high-quality typeset
material for Indic scripts using Opentype fonts.
Continuing the focus on the Indian subcontinent, Amitabh Trehan of
the Mahatma Gandhi Antarrashtriya Hindi Vishwavidyalaya, Delhi,
India, narrated the experiences of his team in typesetting in Hindi,
Sanskrit and Persian. They had recently published the first Indian-
language book totally typeset in LaTeX, using the devnag package,
later, also incorporating the sanskrit and ArabTeX packages.
In her paper, Gy\"ongyi Bujdos\'o of the University of Debrecen,
Hungary, dealt with how the Hungarian TeX Users Group (MaTeX) has
resumed the localization of LaTeX for the Hungarian language, keeping
in mind the specialities of Hungarian grammar, like hyphenation, and
handling definite articles and suffixes. By the time Gyongyi had got
to plans for designing special Hungarian ligatures and new fonts,
everyone had built up a reasonably good appetite!
Thankfully for the organizers, the first lunch of TUG 2002 proved to
be a hit, with most of the delegates preferring to polish off the
local Indian dishes, and giving the continental offerings a wide
berth! There weren't too many complaints about levels of spice
either, normally the scarier side of Indian cuisine for the average
foreign visitor.
The post-lunch session was kicked off by Satish Babu, Chair of the
TUG 2002 Organizing Committee who, while admitting that he was
preaching to the converted, nevertheless went on to give an Indian
perspective of the free software model, and how a poor country like
India can use it as a key enabler in the development process.
In his talk on ``The Tao of Fonts'', Wlodzimierz Bzyl of the
University of Gdansk, Poland, searched through Yin and Yang symbols
and I Ching hexagrams for answers to such questions as: Why are there
so many variations of letter-like shapes? How were these achieved?
And what are the other ways of getting them?
In the last talk of the day, Roozbeh Pournader of the Sharif
University of Technology, Tehran, Iran set his sights on ``Unicode,
the Moving Target''. He stressed the recently introduced features of
Unicode, now over a decade in development, and pointed out how the
TeX community has remained largely ignorant of the moving target,
preferring to stick to its own special formats and traditions. He
also specified new requirements for the Omega typesetting system, to
make it usable for standard renderings.
Which, predictably enough, drew some sharp observations from John
Plaice of the University of New South Wales, Australia, and primary
author of the Omega (and now, Omega 2) project, billed as the
successor of TeX.
In fact, all the lectures were followed by brief Q\&A sessions, which
often had to spill over to the lunch and tea breaks. Needless to add,
these bouts helped renew several old passions, while igniting many
more new ones!
Back at the Hotel Samudra, Kaveh Bazargan of Focal Image Ltd., UK,
and Member of the TUG 2002 Organizing Committee, had arranged for a
live demo of kalari payattu, the traditional Kerala martial arts
form, on the lawns of the hotel, just before dinner. Introducing the
show, Dominik Wujastyk of University College, London, explained some
of the salient aspects of the art form and its significance to the
development of other Asian forms like karate and kung fu.
Day Two
Thursday, 5 September managed to squeeze in one more speaker to the
day's list, taking it up to a total of eight lectures. The day began
with an invited keynote talk by Hans Hagen of Pragma, Netherlands,
who illustrated the fact that TeX can meet many of the demands of
modern publishing, especially thanks to the tight integration of the
ConTeXt macro package with METAPOST. With ConTeXt becoming XML-aware,
users can now comfortably mix XML and TeX techniques, he pointed out.
David Kastrup of Bochum, Germany, in his lecture, revisited WYSIWYG
paradigms for authoring LaTeX, highlighting input manipulation tools,
including editors like TeXMACS and LyX, and page-oriented previews
like Whizzy-TeX and Instant Preview. Kastrup's own preview-latex
package offers better coupling by placing previews of small elements
into the source buffer.
In the third talk of the day, Ross Moore of Macquaire University,
Sydney, Australia, elaborated on how serendiPDF makes it easier to
find the correct way to express complicated mathematics, especially
aligned environments, using LaTeX. The existence of extra (initially
hidden) mathematical fields within PDF documents helps solve the
problem of how to search for pieces of mathematics within typeset
documents, he said.
Just before lunch, Stephen M. Watt of the University of Western
Ontario, Canada, lectured on conserving implicit mathematical
semantics in conversion between TeX and MathML. Several efforts have
been made to design software to convert mathematical expressions from
TeX to MathML and vice versa. Unlike the standard approach of
expanding macros and then translating from low-level TeX to MathML,
Watt's approach is to map macros in one setting to corresponding
macros in another, thus conserving implied semantics.
After lunch, Karel Piska of the Academy of Sciences, Prague, Czech
Republic, presented his paper on converting public Indic fonts from
METAFONT into PostScript Type 1 format with the TeXTRACE program
developed by Peter Szabo in 2001. For TUG 2002, Piska prepared a
collection of PostScript Type 1 Indic fonts corresponding to their
METAFONT sources from CTAN.
In a joint presentation on FarsiTeX and the Iranian community, Behdad
Esfahbod and Roozbeh Pournader of the Sharif University of
Technology, Tehran, Iran, dwelt on the history, technicalities and
future of FarsiTeX, the bilingual Persian/English localized version
of LaTeX that meets the minimum requirements of Persian mathematical
and technical typography. The FarsiTeX project team is working on a
new release with PostScript Type 1 fonts, as well as including
Unicode support and integration with Omega, Esfahbod and Pournader
said.
Denis Roegel of LORIA, France, presented a paper on the METAOBJ
system and its features for the implementation of very high-level
objects within METAPOST. He first dealt with the usual low-level way
of drawing within METAPOST, and then described a functional approach
to drawing and how objects can be implemented.
In the last lecture of the day, Karel Skoupy proposed a new
typesetting language and system architecture to overcome the
oversimplified type system of TeX and the incomplete set of TeX
primitives. Skoupy's future typesetting system will be composed of
flexible components that can support multiple inputs (TeX, XML) and
output formats (DVI, PostScript, PDF) and different font types.
The second day of TUG 2002 ended with the official -- and sumptuous --
conference dinner at Hotel Samudra, which was preceded by a song-and-
dance show by a group of homeless children from the Sri Chitra Home
for the Poor and Destitute, Trivandrum, as well as a flute recital of
classical Carnatic music by V. C. George. Both these offerings were
greatly enjoyed by the delegates, many of whom posed alongside the
performers for souvenir photographs.
Many also lingered on long after the performances and dinner, to
savour the cool breeze from the sea, late into the night, emboldened
by the fact that the next day, Friday, would be a relatively
easygoing day, with no official sessions scheduled. This was made
necessary by an earlier call by local trade unions for a day-long
general strike that would have prevented vehicular traffic on the
streets of Trivandrum, which would have made it almost impossible for
delegates to reach Technopark. The organizers therefore rescheduled
the programme to allow for some tutorials for delegates at Hotel
Samudra itself. In the event, though the strike was called off at the
last minute, the delegates spent the Friday well, some attending
David Kastrup's tutorial, and others setting out for sightseeing and
shopping!
Day Three
Saturday, 7 September began with none of the laziness of a typical
weekend, as the TUG Business Session reviewed the past year's annual
report, discussed some points of budgets and finances, and the
forthcoming elections to various official posts.
After that, the first lecture of the day was by G. Nagarjuna of the
Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai, who talked on
semantic Web, the GNOWSYS project and online publishing.
The theme of online communication was also a key point in the next
presentation by Srivathsan, Director of the Indian Institute of
Information Technology and Management - Kerala (IITMK), who talked of
using free software in the nationwide education grid that his
institute is now working on.
A Chinese touch followed, with a presentation by the founder and
Chairman of the Chinese TeX Users Group, Hong Feng, who attempted to
marry TeX with Lojban, an artificial, ambiguity-free language
constructed in 1955. Feng pointed out how it is possible to encode
Chinese by using Lojban as the meta-language and by importing the
idea of re-encoding Chinese in variable length strings of human-
readable ASCII codes.
In a brief but interesting presentation just before lunch, K.
Anilkumar of Linuxsense Information Systems, Trivandrum, India,
presented a way of exploiting shell-escape to make TeX read databases
and generate reports.
In the first lecture after lunch, John Plaice of the University of
New South Wales, Australia presented a paper written along with
Yannis Haralambous of the Ecole Nationale Superieure des
Telecommunications de Bretagne, France. They presented tools, based
on the Omega typesetting system and using fonts from devnag, for
typesetting languages using the Devanagiri script (Hindi, Sanskrit,
Marathi). These tools can be adapted to particular environments of
input methods and fonts, and even to other Indic languages, the paper
argued.
Fabrice Popineau of SUPELEC, France, talked of what's new with the
7th version of TeXLive under Windows. He also told delegates of an
imminent project, funded by the French Ministry of Education, to
tightly integrate XEmacs and TeX to provide an easy-to-use, out-of-
the-box word processing tool.
In the last lecture of TUG 2002, Karel Skoupy discussed the
development of a TeX file server, which will offer cross-network
transparency and resource sharing. He demonstrated the prototype of
the server, and its protocol and integration with kpathsea.
Before the closing ceremony of TUG 2002, delegates were treated to a
video display that showcased the attractions of Big Island, Hawai'i,
the venue of TUG 2003, the Silver Anniversary of TeX.
At the closing ceremony, Satish Babu thanked all those who had worked
tirelessly to make the conference a success. Dominik Wujastyk summed
up the achievements of TUG 2002, noting, in particular, how potential
disruptions had been managed in a quiet, unobtrusive and peaceful
manner.
As TUG 2002 came to a close, and delegates began exchanging hugs and
goodbyes (or ``Alohas'', which is Hawai'ian for both ``goodye'' and
``hello''), all eyes were trained on the Outrigger Waikola Beach
Resort, Big Island, Hawai'i, where, from July 20 to 24, TeXies will
congregate to celebrate 25 years of TeX.
See you in Hawai'i!
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