The book is a collection of dreams for how we want text to evolve as well as how we understand our current textual infrastructures, how we view the history of writing, and much more. The aim is to make it inspire a powerfully rich future of text in a multitude of ways today and to still have value in a thousand years and beyond. It should serve as a record for how we saw the medium of text and how it relates to our world, our problems and each other in the early twenty first century.
I have been working quite some time on a new front end for the TeX Live Manager tlmgr. Early versions have leaked into TeX Live, but the last month or two has seen many changes in tlmgr itself, in particular support for JSON output. These changes were mostly driven by the need (or ease) of the new frontend: TLCockpit.
This is not a technical article on using TeX (i.e, TeX installation or programming). Instead, it offers some background information for people who work in STM (scientific, technical and medical) publishing and aims to provide an easy-to-follow explanation by addressing the question “what is TeX?”—and, hopefully, demystifies some confusing terminology. My objective is, quite simply, to offer an introduction to TeX-based software for new, or early-career, STM publishing staff—especially those working in production (print or digital). Just by way of a very brief bio, as in “am I qualified to write this”: I’m writing this piece based on my 20+ years of experience of STM publishing, having worked in senior editorial positions through to technical production and programming roles. In addition, over the last few years I have spent a great deal of time building and compiling practically every TeX engine from its original source code, together with creating my own custom TeX installation to explore the potential of production automation through modern TeX-based software.
Das Textsatzsystem TeX ist mit LuaTeX in einer Variante implementiert, die einerseits Unicode umfassend umsetzt, und andererseits mit der Skriptsprache Lua programmierbar ist. LuaTeX ist jetzt als stabile Version 1.0.0. erschienen.