someone with a report about the DANTE meeting?

someone with a report about the DANTE meeting?

[Uwe Koloska]

Hello,

I would like to hear something about the DANTE meeting from the lucky 
persons that were able to be there.

Uwe

-- 
mailto:koloska@rcs.urz.tu-dresden.de
http://rcswww.urz.tu-dresden.de/~koloska/
--                                    --
right now the web page is in german only
but this will change as time goes by ;-)

Re: someone with a report about the DANTE meeting?

[S2P development]

Uwe Koloska wrote:
> 
> Hello,
> 
> I would like to hear something about the DANTE meeting from the lucky
> persons that were able to be there.

... and so would the Maps editors. :-)

Taco

Re: someone with a report about the DANTE meeting?

[H. Ramm]

Uwe Koloska schrieb:
>I would like to hear something about the DANTE meeting from the lucky 
>persons that were able to be there.

I'll try to give a short overview.
I'm not yet a member of DANTE, and it was my very first TeX-meeting.

I was surprised about the excellent organisation and timing: There was
nearly no idle time but no stress, and the events that took place at the 
same time had mostly different target groups, so that it never was hard 
to decide where to go (at least for me).

Our ConTeXt meeting was a bit reduced (only Hans, Patrick and later me).
Hans showed us some of his newest developments that increased my
enthusiastic hope on ConTeXt. From my point of view I see ConTeXt on its
way from a "plain" typesetting system to a real (macro-based, not WYSIWYG)
layout system. 
(On TeX-D-L I'm known as ConTeXt's german PR department) ;-)

[Introduction to XML by Günther Partosch:]
Günter showed the structuring of XML and the possible ways for converting
and typesetting XML with (La)TeX (DSSSL, XSL etc.). A good introduction.

(I couldn't go to the BibTeX-events.)

[Emacs as working environment for TeX by Gerd Neugebauer:]
My judgment about Emacs before this introduction was: Emacs is able to
to everything, but the user interface is a catastrophy.
My judgment after all is the same. ;-)
Emacs is a matter of taste. It misses some ten years of software
ergonomy, but if one is used to it, it's the platform of choice, not
only for TeX.

[Introdcution to pdfTeX by Thomas Feuerstack:]
Thomas told nearly nothing about pdfTeX, but about the LaTeX package 
hyperref. Not so bad, but the worst lecture of the meeting.

[Metapost -- the hidden beauty of metapost by Hans Hagen:]
Hans impressed the audience with his nice (but loudly colored ;-)
graphics and the presentation of the nearly infinite possibilities of
the neglected metapost and the metafun macro package. Some people may
stay at pstricks anyway. The speech made desire on more...

(at the same time there was something about the SiSiSi -- secure
sense-depending hyphenation -- for german. seemed to be interesting for
specialists, even if TeX's normal hyphenation is pretty good.)

[Books about TeX and typography with Gerd Neugebauer:]
A real interactive workshop! ;-)  Gerd showed (the covers of) a bunch of
books, some old standards, some new, and let the listeners tell their
opinion about them. Some books were discussed controversely.

[Conversion of XML documents with XSL to LaTeX by Michael Niedermair:]
Sorry, I can't remember, and I've got no script.

[Future of TeX in a XML dominated world by Sebastian Rahtz:]
Sebastian is known as a real TeX insider. He lost his interest in TeX
and wants to do everything with XML. He characterizes TeX -- the program 
-- as a suitable XML-processor, if one wants to get printed output. He
showed several possibilities to convert from and to XML/TeX and showed
up some other relationships. But he said, the interest on pretty printed
documents would be too low for him and others to invest much work --
everyone would concentrate on other applications of XML.
Not only this event heated the discussion about the sense of XML...

[MathML, how to present your content by Hans Hagen:]
Do I have to tell about? Thank you, Hans, for the nice manual!
Now we know how to format the math for XML or ConTeXt, but I think, no
one except Hans likes the strange syntax and code monsters of MathML.
I understand, that the formatting of the sense, not the view, of maths,
can save some work on unifying large documents and converting from one
math formatting convention to another, but without a helpful editor,
writing MathML seems to be a torture...

(I missed some other about LaTeX in education, PlainTeX and arabic maths)

[PSNFSS system for using PS fonts with LaTeX by Walter Schmidt:]
Walter is one of the german font gurus and told step by step, how to use
the standard PS fonts and how fonts work with TeX, dvi, ps and PDF.

[Professional Prepress by H. H. Ramm:]
I tried to show up, how a "normal" typesetter works with a layout
program and gave some hints, what TeX users should do or think about, if
they give PS or PDF files to a printshop.

[Prepress and color separation with TeX by Ulrich Grabowsky:] 
Uli presented his postscript separation tool (LaTeX package tiffinc) and
how he made it. It uses pre-separated TIFFs with special file names and
works by controlling dvips with DOS batches. (Seems to be working, but I
can't recommed this way.)

[state of the NTS project by Hans Hagen:]
In short: NTS reaches beta state, and the project team detected "the
last bug of TeX" -- a calculation error in the seldom used \xleaders.

-- 
Grüßlis vom Hraban!
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