@yo' The TUG President is primus inter pares: no special powers but the 'lead' in say discussions. So if they are not available (for any reason) someone else can 'fill in'
@yo' UK-TUG is similar: if our Chair isn't present at some meeting, someone else from the committee simply does the chairing.
@JosephWright -- election only every two years, per the bylaws. obviously, there's a hole in the system, and how to plug it will be discussed forthwith. (who would ever have thought that this would be needed?)
@JosephWright -- until the last election, paper ballots were the norm; doing that every year gets expensive, never mind time-consuming. president's term is two years, and term of ordinary board members, four years; it was considered prudent to keep a few people around who know what's going on.
@PauloCereda The members of TUG will be such persons, natural or legal, ... -- I suppose you either need to pretend you're a person, or to convince some authority to give you the legal status of such.
@barbarabeeton Thanks for your comment on the terminal question. Am I totally off base? Can I add "TeX was designed at a time when terminals had already become keyboards and screens"?
@AndrewCashner -- i'm not sure that was true everywhere, but it certainly was at stanford. (at the ams, we were still working with punched cards and greenbar printouts. remember greenbar, or are you too young?)
@egreg -- we got the first screens here to support tex, on a decsystem 20. (also the first on-desk input devices.) it was decided initially that only one terminal was needed per department, and you know where they went -- onto the desks of the dept managers, so that no useful work got done. needless to say, that arrangement didn't last very long.
@AndrewCashner -- ah, poor child, what you've missed! the first computer i ever got my hands on had multiple cpu units with ferrite core, and enormous tape drives, each the size of a quite good sized refrigerator. and a raised floor (watch where you're walking when new cables are being strung.) and peripherals with plug boards. fun stuff!
@yo' First one we had was a 286, about the same time. However, schools in the UK has CP/M machines for some time: we'd had them from mid-1980s and at my secondary school had a network (plus Winchester disk) we used for WordStar, ...
@barbarabeeton I do have a punch card that I use as my bookmark for Knuth's TAOCP. (I like to read it and pretend I might someday understand some of it. I can program a bit in MIXAL at least.)
@egreg -- no kidding! the card reader was so noisy that the dept manager called it the "20th century limited". (that is, or was, a crack passenger train that went, if i remember correctly, from chicago to los angeles.)
@barbarabeeton A musicologist recently presented a conference paper on "The Keyboard as a Digital Interface" (meaning musical keyboards and digits as in fingers), but I felt there was a missed opportunity to think about parallels with early computer interfaces.
@yo' -- there were wags in the brown u computer center who wrote programs that would cause the band printer to "hum" little tunes. a totally not approved pastime.
@barbarabeeton Yes, it's a good idea, I just wanted a bit more computer science in it, but really, how nerdy can you get in one paper. Here's the article that resulted: jams.ucpress.edu/content/ucpjams/68/1/151.full.pdf (sadly, not produced with LaTeX)
@yo' -- that too. (you left out the fact that on some mainframes, you could heat up a bowl of soup by placing it in just the right place by the heat exchanger.)
@barbarabeeton on a similar note, I remember my dad's story how the soldiers from the communications department were using the first WiFi antennas as "grills". Not knowing the dangers of course.
@PauloCereda What a warm welcome! Thank you! I was busy moving and adjusting to new demands as a professor. Still using LaTeX every day for syllabi, research, etc.
@AndrewCashner indeed (also, I took the mathcal font from tgpagella rather than from euler, and maybe there're more modifications, I don't remember now)
@JosephWright not sure, I'll see if I can match what is inferable from mathclass.txt with the stix2 data (@barbarabeeton is there a schedule for any public stix2 info?)
@egreg the officer of the university said like "geometrické ah ok pohledy wow really that word? reprezentace ess or zet? komplexních now this is really complex..."
@WillRobertson On a more serious note, I found only some very strange version of Palatino sans for free, and it was missing some characters that I needed (namely ů and č and had some other issues if I remember correctly)
@yo' Very classy. I just printed mine and put it in a three-ring binder. Now I have to revise it for a book. I've already found so many mistakes, it's embarrassing!
@AndrewCashner there'll always be mistakes. You know what? The very last reference in my thesis is missing punctuation (a closing parenthesis). So horrible!
@AndrewCashner the hardcover is quite standard, I just specified the texts and trusted the bookbinder. The papercover can be done in many ways, there are little restrictions, so I went with a bold yellow/blue mixture.
@RomainPicot -- i can't say i've visited every part, it's so extensive! but i've been through quite a lot of it. it's quite amazing how differently the works are displayed in different sections; of course, the mona lisa pretty much stands alone, but in the galleries of 18th century (i think) painters, the walls are jammed so full of paintings that there's almost no room for identifying labels. maybe that's why i particularly like the d'orsay -- it's so spacious (and i like old train stations).
@barbarabeeton If I remember well, around 10% of every objects that the Louvre old are display ! If you love stone and minerals you also have the "galerie de minéralogie et de géologie" that reopened. And not crowned at all (at least the last time I went ;-) )
@AndrewCashner well, if you look at the figure on page 25, you see that there are 4 distinct shapes of the "tiles". They are not "algorithmic" (well, we have algorithms for drawing them, but that's another thing), they are bond to specific map: each map in the family we study has its own tiles and its own tiling. Note that it is repetitive, but not periodic (like a nice symphony, you hear the main tune again and again, but it's always something new)
@AndrewCashner the map gives a particular type of positional expansions (think binary expansions as in computers of decimal expansions as on your bill). To each such map, if the base (think 2 or 10) has a certain property, we associate a tiling. The properties of the tiling are closely related to the arithmetics on the expansions.
@yo' -- i like old mill buildings too. there are still a lot of them in this area, and many are being rehabbed for new uses, like dwelling lofts. and i do like trains. (i've still got my paris carte orange.) the trains are really neat in japan, and also good in most of europe. and if you like railroad history, here's the story of a u.s. museum i really like: borail.org//History-of-the-Museum.aspx .
i dont know anything about tugboat and their website is hard to look at, do you think showcasing auto-latex equations will be free and fit in the rest of their magazine?
@RomainPicot -- oh, rocks and minerals -- i'll have to visit that next time i'm there. (my mother got rid of my rock collection while i was away at college, and i've never forgiven her.)
@barbarabeeton oh old mills, they have some interesting air, both the water mills and windmills. We've got a number of such buildings in our countryside, many are abandonded and you can sneak in (at your own risk of course)
@Joe In this issue there's couple articles that introduce a LaTeX package. Your topic is similar (introducing a LaTeX-related tool), so you can get an idea by reading the articles ;)
@yo' -- i was actually thinking of textile mills; this area was home to the birth of the american industrial revolution. here's an intro to the very first one: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slater_Mill_Historic_Site
@yo' I might understand some of that! Reminds me of a lecture I heard on the relationship of medieval music to art and architecture, where after showing a bunch of slides of cathedral-floor labyrinths and such, the professor concluded, "Which brings me back to my main point, which is, Patterns."
@RomainPicot -- well, the carte orange was merely a receptacle into which you slid your ticket; that was always separate. the important thing is that it carried a photo of the owner, so it was also local identification. (it was very handy when i was attending iso working group meetings in and around paris.) is the "navigo" similar, or just the ticket?
@AndrewCashner oh, so like the syntax needed and comparison to other editors and things? @yo' should I submit my article as a 2-3 paged, 2 coloumn latex document?
@JoeBob I might think of an outline like this: (1) the problem that made the website necessary, (2) what the website does to solve the problem with a bit of technical detail, and (3) how to use it and what you might use it for (not a full tutorial, just the basics).
