The TUG 2015 conference is currently taking place in Darmstadt, Germany, from 20th to 22nd of July. That’s the 36th anual meeting of the international TeX Users Group. DANTE e.V. sponsored the conference fee for its members with 50 Euro for each attendee. I’m sure this great sponsoring helped many TeX friends to come.
I’m working for Lufthansa Industry Solutions, I’m developing and implementing networks for cruise ships. I planned to visit the conference privately. When I told my project team, that I will leave for 3 days, they asked me, why. Conference? TeX? What is this? I explained what TeX is and how I used it in my work. I use TeX as macro language for creating thousands of lines of switch configurations. And I create graphics visualizing physical and logical structure of networks using TeX coding, actually TikZ. What other people point and click with Visio. That convinced my boss to consider the TeX meeting as training, so the company takes my travel costs. He expects that our work in designing and documenting can really benefit, and this is true. So,
I took a flight from Hamburg to Frankfurt, and then the Airliner bus which goes in 30 minutes straight to Darmstadt. I preferred it over the train because of the free WiFi and air condition there. I did not afford to take the meeting hotel, but chose a smaller hotel nearby, in walking distance.
It’s hot here. Really hot, up to about 30 degrees.
I arrived at Sunday right before the conference. There was an informal gathering at 7 pm in a restaurant, so I walked there. The restaurant was pretty full of TeX friends, seems like almost everybody was already there. That was a great occasion to meet people again, some I did not see since 2011, when I attended the TUG meeting in Kerala, India. Such as Kaveh Bazargan, who has been elected to be the next TUG president. His plans are very interesting, so he is interested in boosting online presence, attracting new users, and attracting publishers to get things funded. Of course I met many DANTE members, who I saw last time in Stralsund earlier this year at the DANTE meeting. I also had interesting discussions, such as about tex4ht, with two men from VTeX, a LaTeX-based publishing company based in Vilnius, Lithuania. I met Rainer Kotucha again, who is a regular at TUG and DANTE meetings since a long time. When you arrive in a restaurant, where you don’t know most of the faces yet, it’s good to see a familiar face. As often, Rainer takes photos of the conference and the life around.
Finally just a group of DANTE people were left over. About 11pm or so it was time to return to the hotel. On Monday morning, the TUG presentations will start. I will report about it in the next post.