42nd Annual Confereence of the Tex Users Group

A meta-post on social events and my presentation at TUG21

Background

Much the same as the rationale behind my other presentation meta-posts, but with some added shilling; since TUG is fantastic. Plus like the last year, I was gven the opportunity to coordiate social events with Jennifer Claudio.

Social Events

• Since the 41st TUG in 2020; there is a Zulip instance which is active all year round ¹
  • Can be joined here
• This year there was a Topia instance for more “pseudo-real” interactions
  • Details sent to people who registered (free)

Slides

Title

Continuous Integration and TeX with Org-Mode

In this talk I would like to introduce the usage of TeX and templates along with generating ad-hoc class and style files for working with orgmode. In particular, I will highlight also the process by which literate programming practices can be implemented with babel. This allows for a more native and flexible alternative to vendor locked in systems like Jupyterlab which rely on JS based inelegant approaches towards TeX typesetting. Finally, I would like to go into how to leverage CI methods for TeX workflows augmented with git.

• A pdf copy of the slides are embedded below
• The orgmode source is here on the site’s GH repo

Video

• As seen in the schedule:

Thoughts

• We had a Zulip channel and separate streams for each talk
  • This was a bit confusing for some participants
• Some people preferred Topia because of the point and click interface
  • However browser support and low connectivity were a problem

Conclusions

The TeX community is one of the best online communities around. There aren’t any friendlier or better versed in the topics presented, so this is definitely a group I hope to continue to be a part of. There were some great suggestions for developing the concepts further to make things more user friendly as well; which might be great fodder for another presenation next year perhaps. Plus there’s TUGBoat.