Publications in 2009 and earlier

TUG Conference 2009 (Notre Dame, Indiana, USA)

TeX-free LaTeX, an overview

• Chris Rowley
• TUG Conference 2009 (Notre Dame, Indiana, USA)
• Video of the talk: TeX-free LaTeX, an overview (via River Valley TV)

Standards for LaTeX documents and processors

• Chris Rowley
• TUG Conference 2009 (Notre Dame, Indiana, USA)
• Video of the talk: Standards for LaTeX documents and processors (via River Valley TV)

Next steps for breqn (slides)

• Morten Høgholm
• TUG Conference 2009 (Notre Dame, Indiana, USA)
• Video of the talk: Next steps for breqn (via River Valley TV)

Consolidation of expl3 (slides)

• Morten Høgholm
• TUG Conference 2009 (Notre Dame, Indiana, USA)
• Video of the talk: Consolidation of expl3 (via River Valley TV)
• A code example: boolexpr code example (pdf, see page 14 of the slides for context)

LaTeX3 programming: External perspectives

• Joseph Wright
• Published paper, TUGboat, Volume 30 (2009), No. 1

An introduction by Joseph Wright on the current implementation of the expl3 programming extensions for LaTeX3, highlighting recent changes and improvements.

TUG Conference 2008 (Cork, Irland)

Windows of opportunity: A (biased) personal history of two decades of LaTeX development — Are there lessons to be learned?

• Frank Mittelbach
• TUG Conference 2008 (Cork, Irland)
• Video of the talk: Windows of opportunity: A (biased) personal history of two decades of LaTeX development — Are there lessons to be learned? (via River Valley TV)

The galley Module or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Whatsit

• Morten Høgholm
• TUG Conference 2008 (Cork, Irland)
• Video of the talk: The galley Module or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Whatsit (via River Valley TV)

TUG Conference 2007 (San Diego, USA)

LaTeX3 project update

• Morten Høgholm
• TUG Conference 2007 (San Diego, USA)
• Video of the talk: LaTeX3 project update (via River Valley TV)

The breqn package: revised and revived

• Morten Høgholm
• TUG Conference 2007 (San Diego, USA)
• Video of the talk: The breqn package: revised and revived (via River Valley TV)

Vistas for TeX

• Chris Rowley
• TUG Conference 2007 (San Diego, USA)
• Video of the talk: Vistas for TeX (via River Valley TV)

An exploration of the Latin Modern fonts

• Will Robertson
• Published paper, TUGboat, Volume 28 (2007), No. 2

Will Robertson’s look at the Latin Modern font families and their features.

Interview of Frank Mittelbach – A combined interview of the LaTeX Project director

• Frank Mittelbach, Gianluca Pignalberi, Dave Walden
• Published paper, 2006, Free Software Magazine
• Keywords: LaTeX history, LaTeX future, LPPL, LaTeX3
• Abstract

  Free Software Magazine (FSM) and the TeX Users Group (TUG) both like to publish interviews. Recently, Gianluca Pignalberi of Free Software Magazine and Dave Walden of TUG both approached Frank Mittelbach about interviewing him. Rather than doing two separate interviews, Mittelbach, Pignalberi, and Walden decided on a combined interview in keeping with the mutual interests already shared by Free Software Magazine and TUG.

Page design in LaTeX3

• Morten Høgholm
• Published paper, TUGboat, Volume 27 (2006), No. 2 — Proceedings of the 2006 Annual Meeting

In this article Morten Høgholm is presenting ideas on page design concepts for LaTeX3.

Everything we want to know about Font Resources

• Chris Rowley
• Published paper, TUGboat, Volume 27 (2006), No. 2 — Proceedings of the 2006 Annual Meeting

pdfTeX workshop 2005/09/24-26

HTML presentation of the material from the September 2005 pdfTeX workshop between Thanh The Han, Morten Høgholm, and Frank Mittelbach. The main topic of the workshop was grid typesetting. The material is available both for on-line browsing and download as a zip file (1364 kB).

Please note that some external links contained in the online browsing material are no longer functional.

EuroTeX 2005 notes

HTML presentation of the work done by the LaTeX project team during EuroTeX 2005. It is available both for on-line browsing and download as a zip file (923 kB).

Some note on templates

• Lars Hellström
• Published paper, TUGboat, Volume 24 (2003), No. 2
• Keywords: LaTeX3, designer-interface, evaluation report

A discussion by Lars Hellström of the current implementation of the concept of templates.

The trace package

• Frank Mittelbach
• Published paper, TUGboat, Volume 22 (2001), No. 1/2

This article describes the trace package that is useful when debugging complex (or not so complex) LaTeX code.

From the twentieth annual ACM symposium on Principles of distributed computing in 2001 (Newport, Rhode Island, USA)

The LaTeX Legacy

• Chris Rowley
• Published paper, PODC ‘01 Proceedings of the twentieth annual ACM symposium on Principles of distributed computing, Pages 17-25
• Keywords: LaTeX history, LaTeX future
• Abstract

  The second edition of The LaTeX Manual begins: `LaTeX is a system for typesetting documents. Its first widely available version, mysteriously numbered 2.09, appeared in 1985.’

  It is too early for a complete critical assessment of the impact of LaTeX 2.09 because its world-wide effects on many aspects of many cultures, not least scientific publication, remain strong after 15 years—and that itself is significant in a technological world where a mere 15 months of fame can make and break an idea.

  Therefore this paper provides simply a review and evaluation of the relationship between TeX, LaTeX and some of the major technical developments in the world of quality automated formatting since the publication of LaTeX 2.09 in 1985. It is neither definitive nor comprehensive but I hope it is informative.

Formatting documents with floats – A new algorithm for LaTeX2e

• Frank Mittelbach
• Published paper, 2000
• Keywords: LaTeX3, page makeup, models, concepts, proto-types

At the GUTenberg meeting in Toulouse, Frank presented a paper about a new output routine that is intended to enhance the way LaTeX deals with floating objects in multicolumn environments.

OpenMath, MathML, and XSL

David Carlisle
ACM SIGSAM Bulletin - Special issue of OpenMath, 2000

The above link enables free download of the paper from the ACM Digital Library. (Due to ACM restrictions it unfortunately doesn’t work from the “all-publications” page. If you are there please use the one on the topic page instead.)

TUG Conference 1999 (Vancouver, Canada)

TUG99 talk: New Interfaces for LaTeX Class Design

• David Carlisle, Frank Mittelbach and Chris Rowley
• TUG Conference 1999 (Vancouver, Canada)
• Published paper, 1999
• Keywords: LaTeX3, models, concepts, user-interface, designer-interface, proto-types

The talk given by project team members at the TUG conference in Vancouver on models for user-level interfaces, designer-level interfaces in LaTeX3. Prototype implementations are in Experimental code (Experimental code was retired in 2016: many of the ideas are now implemented in one way or the other in expl3 code and packages; some have been superseded by other ideas; a few still exist on prototype level awaiting further development).

TUG99 poster exhibition: Text of the Apocalypse as Graphics

• Frank Mittelbach and Christina Thiele
• TUG Conference 1999 (Vancouver, Canada)
• Meta fonts by Metafont: Introduction, font sample 1, font sample 2
• Samples of the Apocalypse Graphics: sample 1, sample 2, sample 3, sample 4

Paper and auxiliary material introducing the exhibition held during the TUG99 conference. It displayed the works of Prof. Alban Grimm using Metafont to generate Graphics out of the text of the Book of Revelation.

OpenMath and MathML: semantic markup for mathematics

O. Caprotti, D. Carlisle
XRDS: Crossroads, The ACM Magazine for Students - Special issue on markup languages, 1999

Unambiguous representation of mathematics is crucial for communications among humans or among computer systems. OpenMath is a standard aimed at supporting a semantically rich interchange of mathematics among varied computational software tools such as computer algebra systems, theorem provers, and tools for visualizing or editing mathematical text. MathML is a W3C Recommendation for the encoding of mathematics ‘on the web’ which also includes mechanisms for encoding mathematical semantics. We introduce each of these two languages and describe their relationships.

The above link enables free download of the paper from the ACM Digital Library. (Due to ACM restrictions it unfortunately doesn’t work from the “all-publications” page. If you are there please use the one on the topic page instead.)

Notes on Oldenburg e-TeX/LaTeX3/ConTeXt meeting

• Meeting notes, 1998
• Keywords: TeX extensions, LaTeX3

Ideas for e-TeX/NTS math typesetting

• Meeting notes, 1998
• Keywords: TeX extensions, LaTeX3

Early in 1998 a meeting was held between the e-TeX project and the LaTeX3 project. From this meeting we made some notes. A separate topic during the meeting was the improvement of TeX’s math typesetting.

Default docstrip headers

• Published paper, 1998
• Keywords: documentation of LaTeX2e packages

An article about docstrip headers appeared in TUGboat volume 19, number 2. It describes a change in the wording of the default headers and gives some hints on how to have your own specific headers on your files.

A regression test suite for LaTeX2e

• Frank Mittelbach
• Published paper, 1997
• Keywords: maintaining LaTeX2e

An article describing the regression test suite that has been built for LaTeX over the past years. It describes some of the history and outlines the results we have had from it.

The LaTeX3 Programming Language—A syntax proposal for TeX macro programming

• David Carlisle, Chris Rowley and Frank Mittelbach
• Published paper, 1997
• Keywords: general research, proposed model for LaTeX programming

An article giving a brief overview of the first release of expl3: a proposed LaTeX3 programming language. The article appeared in TUGboat volume 18, number 4. These days expl3 is part of the LaTeX format named “L3 programming layer”.

Multilingual Language Processing Conference 1997 (Tsukuba, Japan)

Language information in structured documents: a model for mark-up and rendering

• Frank Mittelbach
• Multilingual Language Processing Conference 1997 (Tsukuba, Japan)
• Published paper, 1997
• Keywords: general research, proposed model for LaTeX (current and future version)
• Taped version of the talk given in Tsukuba, Japan (Analog recording on YouTube)

In a conference on multilingual typesetting in Japan and later at a TUG conference a new model is presented for dealing with language information in structured documents. The article appeared in the conference proceedings, TUGboat volume 18, number 3.

Unicode Conference 1996 (Mainz, Germany)

Application-independent representation of text for document processing – will Unicode suffice?

• Frank Mittelbach and Chris Rowley
• Unicode Conference 1996 (Mainz, Germany)
• Published paper, 1996
• Keywords: general research, language, text representation

A paper about application-independent representation of text for document processing; it discusses some of the Unicode shortcomings.

LaTeX2e encoding interfaces

• Frank Mittelbach
• Presentation, 1995
• Keywords: LaTeX2e interface, input encoding, font encoding

A presentation held at Brno about the encoding interfaces that LaTeX offers. It discusses the various issues related to input and output encodings.

TUG Conference 1989 (Stanford, USA)

With LaTeX into the Nineties

• Frank Mittelbach, Rainer Schöpf
• Published paper, 1989 TUGboat Volume 10 Conference Proceedings
• Keywords: LaTeX 2.09
• Abstract

  During the last three years, LaTeX has spread widely, even into such new fields as business applications. The fact that there are new classes of users forces one to reconsider the LaTeX implementation and some of its features. Within a few years, LaTeX 2.09 alone will not be sufficient to satisfy the increasing needs of its users. As a consequence one of the important characteristics of the LaTeX concept – the possibility of exchanging documents – is in danger of being sacrificed on the altar of local changes and enhancements.

  Starting from these considerations and from our experiences of several years of LaTeX support, we will present a proposal for a re-implementation of LaTeX. This new version would not only preserve the essential features of the present user interface (in order to be compatible with old LaTeX files), but also take into account already formulated requests, as well as future developments.

The paper of the talk given at the 1989 conference in Stanford that started the LaTeX project.