At Saturday, September 5th, 2015, the German speaking TeX user group DANTE e.v. held this year’s autumn meeting. It took place at the Graz University of Technology in Austria. Coming from Hamburg in Northern Germany, I guess I had the farthest journey. Though it was pretty easy, as I could take a flight via Frankfurt to Graz. I must admit that it’s not a big thing as I work for an airline.
Personally, I liked it very much that the meeting was at a weekend. So it was easy for me to go there without taking days off from the work, which is sometimes just not possible.
I arrived at Friday. There was already an evening gathering, which I did not attend, to recover a bit from the work of the week.
At Saturday morning, 9 am, our president Martin Sievers started the meeting with introductory words. The local organizer Andreas Läßer said welcome to us, and provided information about things beside the official program. We had the usual functional meeting time with talk about ongoing projects and all the things the user group does. As often, we had the short discussion about today’s usefulness of the TeX Collection DVD. I understood that the commonly agreed opinion is to keep it. A factual reason is, that the production is really cheap. Furthermore, sending them to all members is easier than organizing who likes to get it and who does not. I suggested, to add a simple suggestion to the cover letter: if you don’t plan to use the DVD, give it as a present to friends or persons who would like to test TeX. So it’s also good for spreading the word. It probably would not be the case if it would come on an USB drive. Besides that, there’s an enormous cost difference in some thousand factory-made DVDs compared to USB drives. Personally, I appreciate having the DVD in the hand. And I remember times when I was travelling around without a good Internet connection, desperately searching in newsagencies for computer magazines which might have a TeX distribution with it. I never found one at that time. There are so much Linux versions on DVD in computer magazines, but I never saw a TeX DVD or CD coming with a magazine.
Herbert Voß made the first presentation. He showed how to proceed from the commonly used pdfLaTeX to XeLaTeX and LuaLaTeX. Besides showing the few necessary steps, he demonstrated how to use of system fonts of Linux and Windows with LaTeX. A sceptic user asked, why to change the engine, as there are already many high quality fonts available. Herbert’s answer was clear: switching the engine and changing some lines in the preamble, which is well documented, is much easier than integrating a new font into LaTeX. If a font lacks direct TeX support, it can become very difficult with pdfLaTeX. And there are occasions, when you don’t have a choice, such as when a university or company requires to use a certain corporate typeface.
Martin Sievers followed with a talk about historical-critical editions with LaTeX. He showed how to use the package (r)eledmac for this purpose.
Then we had lunch in a Tavern nearby. The lunch and soft drinks were without charges, thanks to DANTE and TUG the budged allowed lunch and dinner free of charge for meeting attendees.
Then I made a short talk about discussion and support for LaTeX on Internet forums. We took a tour through some forums, which I maintain, such as latex-community.org, TeXwelt.de, goLaTeX.de, and TeXnique.fr which was recently started with French TeX friends. I demonstrated the fully automated way of adding LaTeX examples with output image and thumbnails including compiling and ghostscript conversions to TeX galleries, such as TeXample.net and LaTeX-Cookbook.net. Following this, we had a talk about functionality and possible improvements and future plans. People were interested, as DANTE supports the server hardware which run the forums. We spoke about data dumps of publicly accessible data, NNTP interfaces for the forum software. Furthermore, there were some interesting thoughts which could be programmed, such as a central dashboard serving several forums and sites with aggregated RSS feeds and a central panel for interested users, consolidated cross-sites search, and further small improvements for convenience.
Herbert Voß made a second presentation, this time about automated document generation. He showed how to make a shell script, which collects weather data over time from a web site, inserts it into a LaTeX document, which is then processed by pdfLaTeX and copied to a server for worldwide access.
The final talk was made by Doris Behrend. She provided an experience report about using LaTeX in a seminar at a secondary school. There, writing with LaTeX was compulsory. She talked about the challenges and results with LaTeX beginners at school level. There were interesting and good results shown. Of course, in school we cannot expect a high typographic aspiration of LaTeX beginners. I guess, for those people who mastered that seminar, using LaTeX at a university would be natural from the start on.
In the evening, we met for diner in the “Glöcklbräu” tavern. Besides excellent spare ribs, they served a very good local beer.
At Sunday, there was a bus excursion in the southern-styrian wine country. I did not attend since I had to return home, but I heard that the people had fun.
Thanks to DANTE and to the sponsoring institutes of the TU Graz, especially to Andreas Läßer, for organizing this great meeting.