Conference Talks → 🇵🇱

In this talk, I will discuss the recent state of the T_EX community in Japan. First, as background, I will introduce some distinctive characteristics of Japanese typesetting compared to Western typesetting, and briefly explain how T_EX systems tailored for Japanese have addressed these differences. Following this, I will describe recent trends in communication within the Japanese T_EX community, as well as how it is adapting to the active development of LaT_EX.

The presentation about over thirty years of GUST history: key events and achievements, but above all, the people who created this organization.

A special place in this history belongs to the conferences in Bachotek, with their jubilee thirtieth edition providing a perfect opportunity for such a summary. For three decades, Bachotek has been not only a venue for annual meetings but a true center of integration and a melting pot where ideas, inspirations, and temperaments mixed—sometimes explosively, always creatively. In this T_EX cauldron, discussions simmered, ideas bubbled, and solutions brewed, which, when seasoned with the passion and knowledge of both Polish and international participants, transformed into initiatives shaping the activities of GUST and the international T_EX community.

The main theme of the presentation is the commitment and passion of members — people for whom typography and quality have always been paramount values, and who through their work have significantly influenced the shape of digital typography.

We will talk about pipes :‑)

Na to pytanie nie odpowiem, ale spróbuję przedstawić rolę liternictwa w komiksie na podstawie kilku przykładów. Następnie skupię się na przykładach współczesnego liternictwa w komiksie wykonywanego za pomocą fontów komputerowych. Na podstawie doświadczeń z wydawania amatorskiego magazynu komiksowego pokażę, jakie występują problemy ze składem tekstu w dymkach, oraz w jaki sposób zostały wykorzystane fonty komputerowe. Na koniec pokażę kilka przykładów autorskich fontów komiksowych i jak zostały użyte.

By now, those coming to BachoT_EX probably know that ConT_EXt and many of its features relate to typesetting educational materials. Of the many aspects that one has to deal with in that environment, attractive documents is one of them.

A few decades ago a mechanism called ‘column sets’ was implemented that offered a mix of automated and manual controlled makeup of pages with plenty images in various columns, possibly operating on spreads. It's one of the alternative output routines we have. This MkII mechanism was adapted to MkIV and later to MkXL.

However, when we worked on better looking math and a more advanced par builder, we already had set our eyes on improving column sets. Among the fact that some users wanted more of it, there was also a strong educational incentive. It is also one of the areas where high quality rendering still matters and likely T_EX has some future (in addition to self publishing, where users also are willing to spend time on getting it right).

The official release of the upgrade is at the next ConT_EXt meeting but here we show the current state in a real (educational) application. This also demonstrates our approach: working from various complex and demanding real documents. In this talk we stick to the high level interface and the features that we need which in turn will lead to extending the engine.

The ConT_EXt macro package sits in a niche where users have high demands, which then drives development. Of course we need to keep in mind that specific featured fit in the user interface, don't impact performance, and don't mess up the code base.

As a side track of column sets (the previous talk) we came back to long standing requests for parallel documents. Over time various solutions have been provided but all were kind if isolated (in order not to interfere), tested in limited situations and once the user had the job done, these solutions sort of got lost or just idled. Some persistent dedication is needed here.

When we wanted to test column sets and performance we did that on parallel texts. There are not that many resources that can challenge us but the bible is one of them, because it has been translated in many languages. In this talk we show some of what was done over a century ago and see to what extend we can handle some of that automatically. We will show some of our tests and use that to draw the lines of where to stop being automatic and when to bring in some user control.

We continue our talk about column sets with how we achieved the objectives: adding some new mechanisms to LuaMetaT_EX. The original approach of column sets used the page builder in combination with picking up the pieces and filling in the areas used for text.

But this time we took a different route, using ideas that came up while we worked on the par builder. By stepwise pushing our demands to the limits we came to satisfying solutions that fit our demands: predictable high quality rendering of column sets.

In this talk we will show some of the new low level features that make this possible, so we're talking primitives and routines round them. We might kick in some discussion about where we decided to stop being fancy at the cost of the mechanism becoming unpredictable.

To be provided

Pisanie ręczne to jeden z najstarszych sposobów zapisywania informacji. Przez wieki stanowiło główny środek komunikacji i podstawową umiejętność w edukacji. Jednak wraz z postępem technologicznym i coraz powszechniejszym stosowaniem komputerów, pisanie ręczne zaczyna stopniowo zanikać.

W erze cyfrowego postępu i technologicznej rewolucji coraz częściej zastanawiamy się nad różnicami między pisaniem ręcznym a pismem komputerowym. Oba sposoby pisania, wciąż stosowane w szkołach, na studiach i w miejscach pracy, mają swoje zalety i wady. Czy jednak jedno z nich jest lepsze od drugiego?

Czy warto wciąż pielęgnować umiejętność pisania ręcznego?

This academic year is special, we had to teach LaT_EX & Cie. to students who already got first experience with these typesetting systems. First we explain how we chose quite advanced topics. We finish off by commenting feedback from students.

In music, a cluster is a chord comprising at least three adjacent notes of a scale. Cluster can be diatonic or chromatic, there also exist clusters from whole-tone scales. We show and discuss some notations for clusters in music scores from a point of view related to typography.

These last years, getting materials for printed proceedings has been difficult. We propose some discussion about possible ways to improve that.

When we set out to make the full resources of GUST e-Foundry available—including fonts and the software for creating them—we quickly realized that proper documentation was crucial. Ryszard Kubiak took charge of this task. To make the documentation as clear as possible, he decided he needed to understand the semantics of fonts. However, the beasts inhabiting the realm of fonts—as well as the tiny monsters known in jargon as bugs—made this lofty goal quite a challenge.

In my talk, I will share what we have managed to understand and what remains a mystery. Fortunately, by skillfully navigating through the areas haunted by these creatures, we have succeeded in making our software behave in a predictable manner.

For the past few years, we have been working—most recently, Ryszard Kubiak and I—on making GUST fonts and the accompanying font creation software publicly accessible. In this talk, I will briefly outline the current state of our work and, using one of the GUST fonts as an example, demonstrate how our software is used.

To be provided

This presentation provides an overview of our 18-year experience in developing an internal system based on T_EX at a Japanese cram school. The presenter, a chemistry teacher specializing in university entrance exam preparation, has been actively involved in designing and maintaining this system. While T_EX is widely employed for creating educational materials in such subjects as mathematics and physics, we have extended its use across all subjects, including classical Chinese (Kanbun)—a vertically written ancient script.

Rather than adopting mainstream distributions like T_EX Live, we have created a compact, customized T_EX distribution tailored to our specific needs. This distribution, bundled with proprietary packages and applications designed to address our specialized requirements, is deployed to each computer from our file server on a regular basis.

Additionally, I serve as a member of the T_EXShop development team—an open-source T_EX editor for macOS—and have modified its source code to align it with our internal requirements and distribute it across our network. This cohesive ecosystem achieves seamless vertical integration among macOS, T_EX, and the editor, optimizing their collective strengths. Consequently, all staff members, regardless of technological expertise, can efficiently utilize our T_EX-based platform.

In this presentation, I will provide detailed insights into the development of our T_EX-based system, demonstrating the versatility of T_EX beyond its conventional role in typesetting academic documents. This approach highlights T_EX's potential to support diverse educational applications.

Na przekór elektronicznym sposobom komunikacji i utrwalania wiedzy, będę mówił o papierze. Papier, nośnik drukowanej informacji miał zostać wyeliminowany, a tym czasem wraz z ekspansją komputerów rośnie jego zużycie. Barokowy poeta Wacław Potocki pisał tłumacząc z łaciny Johna Barclay’a:

Hands on as per title.

Wybór i kopiowanie dwunastowiecznego inicjału zdobionego arabeskami przy użyciu szeroko ściętych narzędzi pisarskich – patyków, trzcin i stalówek. Można połączyć pomysły warsztatów Willego i moich – wtedy uczestnicy będą personalizowali takim inicjałem swój notatnik skonstruowany na warsztatach introligatorskich.