#tug2024 — Public Fediverse posts

OH: “#PDF is a very complicated format, but you can work with it when you just learn to ignore everything you don''t understand.”

Just discovered that while sorting my notes from the pdf #tagging workshop by the #TeXLaTeX Project Team last week.

That day just was too full with other stuff I didn't manage to directly toot it :D But I still find it worth, as it describes actually a nice way to get stared debugging the tagging.

#TUG2024

Travel back from #TUG2024 was a bit chaotic. Czech railway service also seems to be underfunded. But we made it, just needed yesterday to get kind of a rest.

There is one thing I didn't mention yet and should: I finally received a fitted tshirt!

@TeXUsersGroup sadly didn''t offer that by default, but the local organizer made it possible. Was bit weird to was welcome with the words “that's the special tshirt” at the registration, as others were sorted by size. I even had a personalized label.

Thanks, @TeXhackse, for the live commentary on #TUG2024. I really enjoyed following the conference reading your posts.

Last presentation at #TUG2024 is Martin Ruckert explaining his process of decision making and implementation during the creation of a color concept for the HINT project.
HINT is some kind of responsive format to display documents using the same algorithms as #TeX (https://github.com/ruckertm/HINT/)

As it has a light + dark mode colors are not chosen directly, which actually we all should try to avoid as it makes the content easier to be reused more universal within different document types or layouts..

Last session starts with Didier Verna's extensions to the Knuth-Plass algortihm. He developed them using his ETAP presented last year.

He is introducing an extra variant of contextual demerits to avoid the same word to be placed the same word at the beginning or end of successive lines also questioning if is worth or not depending on a lot of facts.

Link to the ETAP repo: https://github.com/didierverna/etap
Slides containing the data: https://tug.org/tug2024/slides/verna-knuth-plass.pdf

#typesetting #TeX #TeXLaTeX #TUG2024

[1/2] Just in case you use the units #TeXLaTeX package still somewhere within your documents (which always confuses me) you probably want to remove and replace it by #siunitx simple because that's the actively maintained one.

Joseph Wright is now talking about the last updates and plans for the package. The changes are much smaller than the complete reimplementation for v3.0.0 but he still is making the typesetting of numbers and units much easier.

#TUG2024

@sarahalang you might want to have a look at xerif: https://www.le-tex.de/en/xerif.html #tug2024

Antoine Bossard continues with language specific #typesetting:
Specifically Latin verse scansion.

Link to the preprint: https://tug.org/tug2024/preprints/bossard-verse.pdf

Showing how #unicode / #utf8 is improving also old languages, which I will use as a nice argument to get people to use unicode as some still are using #TeXLaTeX macros to insert accents or umlauts, which I just can't understand.

#TUG2024

#TUG2024 day 3 starts with the status update by Ondřej Sojka about his work on expanding the #hyphenation patterns across Slavic languages.

They use #MachineLearning to compare existing patterns to find out if they can be used or adapted to other Slavic languages.This work is not only to be used within #TeX / #TeXLaTeX of course and is (or will be) implemented e.g. in browsers or smartphone operating systems.

Preprint: https://tug.org/tug2024/preprints/sojka-slavic.pdf

#Typesetting

Last talk before the workshop of today @samcarter is once again advertising the moloch #beamer theme. As it's the maintained fork of the metropolis theme I totally agree with her to tell people they should use that one instead.

But there are still discussions to replace metropolis or to just have metropolis load moloch.
#TUG2024 #TeXLaTeX

https://ctan.org/pkg/moloch

Another but kind of different project was presented by Andrew Watters in a prerecorded talk.

He showed his “full spectrum litigator” which I'd describe as an #OpenSource toolchain for the nerdy #lawyer. ;-)

Setup looked similar to what I know from the ERP systems I work with using php to fill in variables into Templates, creating #TeXLaTeX code creating PDFs but also having Email handling and some more specific features.#TUG2024

I hate it when people take my sarcasm seriously #tug2024

[1/2] Jeffrey Kuan as a math professor who is passionate about #a11y is confronted with the claim that a #PDF created via #TeXLaTeX can not be accessible at all. Which is not true but applies to most of the created documents so far.

In his talk he is describing issues he is facing trying to fulfill the law requirements and as someone who actually wants to provide accessible material. Sadly both don't match in a lot of cases.
#TUG2024

[2/2] Same with the tagging sockets.

So just in case you are or plan to develop a package have a look at the publications of the #TeXLaTeX Project to keep yourself up to date with the common interfaces. It's much more helpful if people actually use those instead of having a huge bunch of packages implementing their own auxiliary macros as it was necessary back in the 90s.

You find them via https://www.latex-project.org/ or locally running `texdoc ltnews`

#TeX #TUG2024

[1/2] Spreading new concepts or improvements within the #TeX world is always a bit hard. Sadly there's a lot of users (or publishers) who sadly prefer to keep everything the way it was before. The more important it is that active developers use those interfaces instead of creating their own, as we now know, it's hard to clean that up in case there are incompatible changes.

Frank Mittelbach from the #TeXLaTeX project is once again talking about hooks to make developers using them. #TUG2024

[1/3] Continuing the #a11y topic Ulrike Fischer is giving an update on the status of the #TeXLaTeX tagging-project.
https://github.com/latex3/tagging-project

Also explaining that the LaTeX team is currently pushing the development of #PDF as well as validators and viewers towards PDF 2.0 and Well-tagged-pdf (https://pdfa.org/wtpdf/)

The current tagging structure in some cases is too simple to match the actually complexity of documents but this needs examples to illustrate.
#TUG2024

@norbu presenting #OpenAccess trying to include that aspect at #arxiv.

I've been following the amazing work by @dginev towards #ar5iv for quite a while and in case you might have missed that:
https://ar5iv.labs.arxiv.org/

There's still a lot of work left, but I really love to see progress towards accessibility within the #TeX / #TeXLaTeX and generally #ScientificPublishing community. Especially showing arXiv it's possible to improve on a huge scale.

#TUG2024

Last talk of the session is Joseph Wright speaking about the concept of templates in the #TeXLaTeX kernel.

The concept of providing common interfaces for Layout adjustments exists for a long time within the #TeX world but is now a thing which is pushed by the current development status, as it simplifies preserving the tagging while allowing more flexibility for the layout.

This is using the joy of #expl3 to some higher level commands towards the users.

https://ctan.org/pkg/xtemplate

#TUG2024

Changxu Duan follows up presenting his work. Starting showing that LLMs are better with PDFs where they know the #TeXLaTeX source. Which is not surprising.

His Idea is to add the source as annotation or add it as simplified markdown or XML markup to the PDF document. In contrast to providing the full source attached this is preserving the connection to the object's position.
#TUG2024

Within tagging of typesetted math this is already quite common using the LaTeX code.

As there is a lot of #a11y in #TeXLaTeX for today Simon Pfahler is talking about color schemes for #colorblind people trying to increase awareness for these issues.

Generally the most important point probably is, that you should not encode a single value only in color.

https://ctan.org/pkg/colorblind

It's still in an early state of development but he requested suggestions and feedback to create it as useful as possible.
#TUG2024

Handout for my talk at #tug2024 conference is here: https://www.kodymirus.cz/presentations/responsive_handout.html #TexLatex

The first talk of day 2 #TUG2024 is given by @michal_h21 (#tex4ebook / #tex4ht) who is presenting on rmodepdf which is a tool to convert websites to ebook reader friendly pdf documents. I guess then converting to epub is also not a bit issue. It uses the reader mode and is using luaxml to process the html.

It's interesting to see it also the other way round. As he is usually known for #TeXLaTeX to #html facing different issues.

Link to the rmodepdf repo: https://github.com/michal-h21/rmodepdf/

Mr. Lion and me now got a camera save spot. (At least that's what was told to us and we try to feel that way.)

Picture was taken half an hour ago. Day 2 of #TUG2024 has already started.

As you might see in the picture Mr. lion received his own duck (correctly scaled) from @samcarter, is extremly proud of it and will probably never again travel without it.

@sarahalang starts her talk about #TeXLaTeX within #digitalHumanities with an explanation of DH, stating that usually she has to explain what LaTeX is. Showing her usecase and giving an insight but also explaining about issues which this might add for people without a technical background.

As usual with different subjects I think we all should do more skill sharing across as we just can't imagine how other's might benefit from this exchange.
#TUG2024

Interesting for people within the educational sector:
Wim Obbels, Bart Snapp and Jim Fowler prepared a presentation on the Ximera project. Some interactive math educational resource project with #TeXLaTeX input covering different outputs.

Was not aware – but seems to earn a view
https://github.com/XimeraProject

Project was in a “only bugfix” maintenance status, but now managed to receive funding and looks like making new progress.
Nice to see how funding is pushing projects back to life!

#TUG2024

Now @witiko is talking about the implementation of the themes for the #TeXLaTeX #Markdown package.

So in case you want a more TeXnical approach, which is more flexible than #pandoc this might be a thing for you. May proudly say I contributed small bits to the package, still much less, that I'd have wanted to, but thats the Issue with #OpenSource especially FOSS

He promised we'd all want a wolf plushie in the end, so I really hope he has one for Mr lion ;)

#TUG2024

#TeX / #TeXLaTeX infrastructure has grown wild in huge parts. Trials to modernize are in progress. One step recently taken is presented by Didier Verna talking about the TFM (TeX Font Metrics) validator.

The daily results for #TeXLive are published via https://texlive.info/tfm-validate/fonts.html

And it's not surprising to see that as soon as there are tests one finds issues in published projects. Totally matches my findings. We need more automated testing!

And I know it's a lot of work…

#TUG2024