TUGBOAT Volume 31, Number 1 / 2010 General Delivery 3 From the president / Karl Berry 4 Editorial comments / Barbara Beeton TEX at 25; Pi Day; The @ sign as a design icon; Amusements on the Web; Videos of typography talks on the Web; Alphabet soup 6 An argument for learning LATEX: The benefits of typesetting and beyond / Evan Wessler Publishing 9 A computer scientist self-publishing in the humanities / Nicolaas Mars Typography 12 Strategies against widows / Paul Isambert 18 Theses and other beautiful documents with classicthesis / Andr´eMiede 21 Typographers’ Inn / Peter Flynn Fonts 23 Minimal setup for a (cyrillic) TrueType font / Oleg Parashchenko 26 LuaTEX: Microtypography for plain fonts / Hans Hagen 27 Mathematical typefaces in TEX documents / Amit Raj Dhawan Software & Tools 32 LuaTEX: Deeply nested notes / Hans Hagen Graphics 36 Plotting experimental data using pgfplots / Joseph Wright 50 The current state of the PSTricks project / Herbert Voß 59 From Logo to MetaPost / Mateusz Kmiecik A L TEX 64 LATEX news, issue 19 / LATEX Project Team 65 Talbot packages: An overview / Nicola Talbot 68 Tuning LATEX to one’s own needs / Jacek Kmiecik 76 Some misunderstood or unknown LATEX2ε tricks / Luca Merciadri A L TEX 3 79 LATEX3 news, issue 3 / LATEX Project Team 80 Beyond \newcommand with xparse / Joseph Wright 83 Programming key–value in expl3 / Joseph Wright ConTEXt 88 ConTEXt basics for users: Conditional processing / Aditya Mahajan Hints & Tricks 90 Glisterings: Counting; Changing the layout / Peter Wilson 94 The exact placement of superscripts and subscripts / Timothy Hall 96 The treasure chest / Karl Berry Abstracts 99 ArsTEXnica: Contents of issue 8 (October 2009) 100 Die TEXnische Kom¨odie: Contents of issues 2009/4–2010/2 101 Asian Journal of TEX: Contents of Volume 3 (2009) 102 Les Cahiers GUTenberg: Contents of issues 48–53 (2006–2009) 104 Eutypon: Contents of issue 22–23 (2009) 105 MAPS: Contents of issue 38–39 (2009) 105 Baskerville: Contents of issue 10.2 (2009) 106 Zpravodaj : Contents of issue 16(1), 19(3)–19(4) (2006, 2009) TUG Business 109 TUG financial statements for 2009 / David Walden 110 TUG institutional members News 111 Calendar Advertisements 112 TEX consulting and production services TEX Users Group Board of Directors TUGboat (ISSN 0896-3207) is published by the TEX Donald Knuth, Grand Wizard of TEX-arcana † Users Group. Karl Berry, President ∗ Kaja Christiansen∗, Vice President Memberships and Subscriptions David Walden∗, Treasurer 2010 dues for individual members are as follows: ∗ Susan DeMeritt , Secretary Ordinary members: $95. Barbara Beeton Students/Seniors: $55. Jon Breitenbucher The discounted rate of $55 is also available to Jonathan Fine citizens of countries with modest economies, as Steve Grathwohl detailed on our web site. Jim Hefferon Membership in the T X Users Group is for the E Klaus H¨oppner calendar year, and includes all issues of TUGboat Ross Moore for the year in which membership begins or is Steve Peter renewed, as well as software distributions and other Cheryl Ponchin benefits. Individual membership is open only to Philip Taylor named individuals, and carries with it such rights † TUG Raymond Goucher, Founding Executive Director and responsibilities as voting in elections. For † TUG Hermann Zapf, Wizard of Fonts membership information, visit the web site. ∗ Also, (non-voting) TUGboat subscriptions are member of executive committee †honorary available to organizations and others wishing to receive TUGboat in a name other than that of an See http://tug.org/board.html for a roster of all individual. The subscription rate is $100 per year, past and present board members, and other official including air mail delivery. positions. Institutional Membership Addresses Electronic Mail Institutional membership is a means of showing con- TEX Users Group (Internet) tinuing interest in and support for both TEX and P. O. Box 2311 General correspondence, the TEX Users Group, as well as providing a dis- Portland, OR 97208-2311 membership, subscriptions: counted group rate and other benefits. For further U.S.A. [email protected] information, see http://tug.org/instmem.html or TUGboat contact the TUG office. Telephone Submissions to , +1 503 223-9994 letters to the Editor: [email protected] TEX is a trademark of the American Mathematical Society. Fax Technical support for +1 206 203-3960 TEX users: [email protected] Copyright c 2010 TEX Users Group. Copyright to individual articles within this publication Web Contact the Board remains with their authors, so the articles may not be reproduced, distributed or translated without the authors’ http://tug.org/ of Directors: permission. http://tug.org/TUGboat/ [email protected] For the editorial and other material not ascribed to a particular author, permission is granted to make and Have a suggestion? Problems not resolved? distribute verbatim copies without royalty, in any medium, TUG provided the copyright notice and this permission notice are The Board wants to hear from you: preserved. Please email [email protected]. Permission is also granted to make, copy and distribute translations of such editorial material into another language, [printing date: May 2010] except that the TEX Users Group must approve translations of this permission notice itself. Lacking such approval, the original English permission notice must be included. Printed in U.S.A. Consistency in spelling is difficult when two alphabets are involved... Ali Ahmad Jalali and Lester W. Grau The Other Side of the Mountain: Mujahideen Tactics in the Soviet-Afghan War (1995) COMMUNICATIONS OF THE TEX USERS GROUP EDITOR BARBARA BEETON VOLUME 31, NUMBER 1 • 2010 PORTLAND • OREGON • U.S.A. 2 TUGboat, Volume 31 (2010), No. 1 TUGboat TUGboat editorial board This regular issue (Vol. 31, No. 1) is the first issue of Barbara Beeton, Editor-in-Chief the 2010 volume year. No. 2 will contain the TUG Karl Berry, Production Manager 2010 (San Francisco) proceedings and No. 3 will Christina Thiele, Associate Editor, contain papers from the EuroTEX 2010 conference Topics in the Humanities in Pisa, Italy. Production team TUGboat is distributed as a benefit of member- William Adams, Barbara Beeton, Karl Berry, ship to all current TUG members. It is also available Kaja Christiansen, Robin Fairbairns, to non-members in printed form through the TUG Robin Laakso, Steve Peter, Yuri Robbers, store (http://tug.org/store), and online at the Michael Sofka, Christina Thiele TUGboat web site, http://tug.org/TUGboat. On- line publication to non-members is delayed up to one year after an issue’s print publication, to give Other TUG publications members the benefit of early access. TUG is interested in considering additional manu- Submissions to TUGboat are reviewed by vol- scripts for publication, such as manuals, instruc- unteers and checked by the Editor before publica- tional materials, documentation, or works on any tion. However, the authors are still assumed to be other topic that might be useful to the T X com- the experts. Questions regarding content or accu- E munity in general. racy should therefore be directed to the authors, If you have any such items or know of any with an information copy to the Editor. that you would like considered for publication, send the information to the attention of the Publications Submitting items for publication Committee at [email protected]. The deadline for receipt of final papers for the upcoming TUG 2010 proceedings issue is July 19, TUGboat advertising and for regular material for the third issue is For information about advertising rates and options, September 1. including consultant listings, write or call the TUG As always, suggestions and proposals for TUG- office, or see our web pages: boat articles are gratefully accepted and processed http://tug.org/TUGboat/advertising.html as received. Please submit contributions by elec- http://tug.org/consultants.html tronic mail to [email protected]. The TUGboat style files, for use with plain Trademarks TEX and LATEX, are available from CTAN and the TUGboat web site. We also accept submissions Many trademarked names appear in the pages of using ConTEXt. More details and tips for authors TUGboat. If there is any question about whether are at http://tug.org/TUGboat/location.html. a name is or is not a trademark, prudence dictates Effective with the 2005 volume year, submission that it should be treated as if it is. The following list of a new manuscript implies permission to publish of trademarks which commonly appear in TUGboat the article, if accepted, on the TUGboat web site, should not be considered complete. as well as in print. Thus, the physical address METAFONT is a trademark of Addison-Wesley Inc. you provide in the manuscript will also be available PostScript is a trademark of Adobe Systems, Inc. online. If you have any reservations about posting TEX and AMS-TEX are trademarks of the American online, please notify the editors at the time of Mathematical Society. submission and we will be happy to make special arrangements. TUGboat, Volume 31 (2010), No. 1 3 From the President • pdfTEX will output PDF version 1.5 by default, enabling better-compressed PDF output. Karl Berry • Inclusion of the Japanese TEX suite, pTEX. Conferences • Oren Patashnik has released the first new version TUG 2010 (http://tug.org/tug2010) takes place of BibTEX in many years, with one small bug fix at the end of June. We are especially excited about to avoid breaking .bbl output lines anywhere this year’s conference, as the 25 anniversary of TEX78. except at whitespace. Donald Knuth and most of his Stanford colleagues We expect the 2010 collection to contain the from the early days of TEX development have indi- same major items as in the past few years: TEX cated they will attend, and we have planned several Live, MacTEX, proTEXt, and a CTAN snapshot.