(2009), No. 2 TEX People: the TUG Interviews Project and Book Karl

196 TUGboat, Volume 30 (2009), No. 2 TEX People: The TUG interviews project 2 The interview method and book Interview subjects are1 chosen based on (a) seeking Karl Berry and David Walden diversity in many dimensions, (b) recommendations from people about who should be interviewed, and Abstract (c) potential interview subjects being willing to be We present the history and evolution of the TUG interviewed. interviews project. We discuss the interviewing pro- The interviews have almost all been done via cess as well as our methods for creating web pages exchange of email using plain text; a couple of ex- and a printed book from the interviews, using m4 as ceptions were done in LATEX. a preprocessor targeting either HTML or LATEX. We For the first several interviews, Dave sent a also describe some business decisions relating to the more or less complete list of questions (once the book. We don't claim great generality for what we interviewee agreed to participate), on the theory that have done, but we hope some of our experience will this would minimize the burden on the interviewee. be educational. However, having a dozen questions to answer at one time proved to be daunting to interviewees. Thus, Dave switched to a process wherein he sent a couple of standard initial questions (namely, \Tell me a 1 Introduction bit about yourself and your history outside of TEX," Dave had two ideas in mind when he suggested (orig- and \How and when did you first get involved with inally to Karl) this interview series in 2004: (a) tech- TEX?"). The answers to early questions then guide nology is created by and evolves with use by people, a couple of follow-on groups of questions. and the points of view and backgrounds of the people The interviewees are encouraged to answer spon- influence the technology; (b) there are lots of people taneously and at any length they desire, both to ease (such as himself) who are relatively new to the TEX the burden of answering the questions and to spur community, who therefore do not know much about spontaneity. Once enough questions have been asked the people who are already significant contributors and answered, Dave converts the plain text into to the community, and who may be curious to know HTML, possibly reordering some of the questions more about past and current contributors to the TEX and answers to improve the flow, does other little community. We also hoped that even long-time mem- bits of necessary editing (all the while trying to main- bers of the TEX community would enjoy reading the tain the voice of the interviewee), and submits the interviews and learn things they did not previously near final draft to the interviewee for review and any know about their fellow TEX people. desired changes. Dave got the idea for an interview series from Karl proofreads every interview before posting. reading the books Mathematical People (edited by He also frequently suggests additional questions, pro- Donald J. Albers and Gerald L. Alexanderson, Birk- vides contact information, and generally encourages häuser,1985) and More Mathematical People (edited and supports Dave in his interview efforts. The by Albers, Alexanderson, and Constance Reid, Har- interviews are then posted on the TUG web site: court, Brace, Jovanovich, 1990). The first of these tug.org/interviews. collections of interviews of mathematicians includes The average interview takes a few weeks of a wonderful interview of TEX creator Donald Knuth elapsed time. The shortest interview took only a (posted at tug.org/interviews/interview-files/ few days. The longest interview took over a year. birkhauser-knuth, by permission from Birkhäuser). In a few cases, Dave has interviewed two people at Dave's first concern was whether anyone would one time | people who were well known for working want to do an interview with him, an unknown in the closely together. In one case, Dave shared the inter- TEX community. He was gratified that Dan Luecking viewing duties with another person (the interview (whose answers on comp.text.tex he admired) and of Frank Mittelbach, which was also published in Lance Carnes (with whom he was working on The the Free Software Magazine). In another case (the PracTEX Journal, published at tug.org/pracjourn) interview of Raph Levien) Karl shared interviewing agreed to be the first interview subjects. These duties with another person. All the rest have been interviews provided a model to which he could point one-on-one interviews. the next people he asked to do interviews, while For quite a while Dave manually reformatted also liberally dropping Karl's name. In time, the interview series seemed to gain advance acceptance 1 The interview series remains an ongoing process, so we with potential interview subjects. describe it here in the present tense. Karl Berry and David Walden TUGboat, Volume 30 (2009), No. 2 197 the interviews in HTML from the original plain text Table 1: Some definitions and their purposes from an questions and answers as part of his editing pass. He early version of our htmldefs.m4 file. is biased toward basic tools (WinEdt, Emacs, FTP, intervieweename used in header and first question etc.) and does not use a \web publishing system". intervieweeinitials used in following questions For the first interviews, we did not think about interviewername used in first question photos. Then we decided to include photos, began interviewerinitials used in following questions asking for them from current interviewees and also par start paragraph asked the early interviewees for photos. We slipped header takes photo file and blurb as parameters up here, in light of our later decision to create a book question1 formatting of first question version of the interviews: we asked for photographs answer1 formatting of first answer with only enough resolution for web display and not question formatting of following questions enough for printing in a book. So we later had to go answer formatting of following answers back to most interviewees again for higher-resolution footer date, etc., at end of interviews images. link link given text to a URL url print and link given URL 3 The idea for the book it italics After a while, we began to discuss the possibility emph also italics of eventually producing a book collecting the inter- ti italics within italics tt typewriter views, after we had about three years' worth, with anglebrackets print argument between h and i a dozen or so interviews done a year. Consequently, Dash em-dash in our interview requests, we also started asking the dash en-dash interviewee to agree for his or her interview to be amp ampersand transcribed from HTML to LATEX and be included in quote double-quote argument the book. We also confirmed that this was acceptable verbatimstart start verbatim block to earlier interviewees. verbatimstop end verbatim block A little while later, Dave decided to create a verb inline verbatim small set of m4 macros (gnu.org/software/m4) in orderedliststart start ordered list terms of which he would transcribe the plain text orderedliststop end ordered list interviews, and the file with the m4 macros would be unorderedliststart start unordered list unorderedliststop end unordered list compiled into HTML for the interviews. His idea was item begin an item in any list that later another set of m4 macros could convert TeX, ... lots of logos which are mostly A the same m4 file to LTEX for the book. All these plain text in HTML, but definitions were in a file called htmldefs.m4, and something fancier in TEX an interview was compiled from its m4 file with a Schopf, ... people's names with diacritics command such as Ecole, ... other words with diacritics m4 htmldefs.m4 SomeInterviewee.m4 \ > SomeInterviewee.html file listing the interviews in chronological order. The An abridged set of the initial m4-to-HTML def- result of all was posted at tug.org/interviews. initions is listed in Table 1. Here are a couple of 2 Some readers may wonder why we didn't use a specific examples: more au courant solution, such as creating the in- define([[_par]],[[<p>]]) ( paragraph) terviews in XML and arranging for that to generate define([[_it]],[[<i>$1</i>]]) ( italics) HTML initially and LATEX later, or doing the inter- To generate LATEX instead of HTML, alternate m4 views in LATEX (which could be used for the book) definitions output \par and \textit{$1}. and using one of the LATEX-to-HTML converters for The individual HTML interviews, both before the web site. The answer is simple: Dave and Karl and after using m4 as a stepping stone to HTML, had already knew something about m4 and saw nothing links in alphabetical order from the interviews home to be gained by struggling with anything new (and page which Dave created manually on the TUG server arguably more complex). with Emacs. He also manually created the HTML 4 Going ahead with the book 2 Readers can mentally skip over the [[ and ]] constructs, In late 2008 we made the decision to develop the which we use as the m4 \quoting" characters, allowing argu- ments to contain characters special to m4 such as commas book. We anticipated self-publishing it using print- and parentheses. More about this later. on-demand from a company like Lightning Source TEX People: The TUG interviews project and book 198 TUGboat, Volume 30 (2009), No. 2 (LSI, lightningsource.com). Karl chose 7 × 10 Karl developed a Makefile (tug.org/interviews/ inches as the page size from the sizes supported book/GNUmakefile) to automatically convert all of by LSI, because it was not so big that it would re- the m4 files into LATEX files, and then compile the quire a two-column format, but otherwise the biggest LATEX files for the interviews and the frontmatter available, so minimizing the number of pages and files into one complete PDF.

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