Conference Talks → 🇵🇱

Accessing language models has meant either a chat window in a browser or the rather inconvenient approach of calling an API — with scripts, tokens, and handling JSON requests and responses. Fortunately, a third, and the only proper, way has finally arrived: CLI tools that work where I prefer to work — in the terminal. Claude Code, OpenAI Codex CLI, Gemini CLI and similar tools have become part of my everyday workflow. In this talk I will describe how I regularly use these interfaces, with particular focus on T_EX-related use cases: from generating and debugging macros, through supporting work with text, to automating various tasks — from very simple but often tedious ones to quite complex ones.

I will show concrete examples of use — both everyday and standard ones, as well as sometimes more wild experiments. I will also discuss what works well in this approach and what to watch out for. The presentation will include examples of integrating AI CLI interfaces not only with T_EX but also with other useful tools such as: git, make, python+venv, docker, html+js+css.

The talk will be practical in nature, illustrated with real-life examples. We will also attempt a live demonstration of some simple tasks, in direct interaction with the AI CLI tools being discussed.

Eeveryone is invited to my papermaking workshop. Papermaking is a fascinating process of creating handmade sheets, allowing you to achieve unique textures and add decorative elements (such as dried flowers, threads, herbs, or dyes). It is a form of recycling in which torn paper or ready-made pulp is soaked, blended, and then formed on a screen and dried. You can write or paint on such sheets. You can make beautiful bookmarks from them and even embed a watermark (during the papermaking process).

All materials will be provided, just bring your decorative elements.

Among the nice things in BachoT_EX are the tiny huts and the yearly “how many people can we fit into 10 square meters, already packed by beds, chairs, tables, a fridge and staircase” contest. Of course there also needs to be room for the various bulky musical instruments, sometimes accompanied by — lucky us, small — phones to get hold of the — old and forgotten — lyrics.

There was a time when such a conference started by unpacking cars with desktops in order to set up a sort of laboratory. Nowadays those who come bring laptops but still there is a bit of setup going on. After all, there is this persistent drive to T_EX something! We’re here to share and not to consume only.

But do we need much more than a beamer? Do we need to carry around all that stuff just to show something that — at least originally — was always meant to produce typeset paper products? Doesn’t it make more sense to gather around a real book?

In these times of Artificial Intelligence we don’t need to carry our brain to a meeting any more, so why carry a laptop with T_EX. In fact, we might even wish to hide the existence of T_EX, just in case it gets abused and its users ridiculed as old-timers and backward texnicians. Of maybe we want to leave our laptop home when we visit a country where border controls get out of hand. We’ll show you how we cope and reflect a bit on the current state. To quote Peter Gabriel in one of his latest songs “The less you have, the more you can make of it”.

Quite some of the code I wrote (and write) is inspired by listening music and that includes some Polish (prog rock) bands. Take songs like “Big Tech Brother” by Riverside, a band I’ve seen a few times and likely will see again. It is able musicians who face the first backslash of all this artificial artistry: copied, ripped off, post-produced, exploited. We can’t say that we weren’t warned.

Alas it is no longer always possible to determine if something that looks arty comes from humans or machines. When we use a computer to produce something and it takes time, we can still consider it human, if only because it actually took time, inspiration, experimenting and whatever it takes that makes us human. But what with instant pseudo intelligent art. How do we keep the tools that we produce ourselves clean from that what makes art disappear. Where do we draw the boundary. Let’s explore some possibilities. Let’s see how we stretch the limits but still involve ourselves. Welcome to our yearly MetaPost update.

“So, you have found yourself in this place …” is how the ‘The Escape Plan’ by the Polish band Less is Lessie starts, a show (with a b/w film of a city in the background) that I attended in the Netherlands. It reminded me of a past that we saw transition into the present while traveling a few decades to BachoT_EX.

By the time you need Artificial Intelligence to understand and produce T_EX, it is reasonable to assume that what you produce is also meant to be consumed by those entities. What we embrace can in return smother us. But that is not how it all started: T_EX was made by humans, to be used by for humans, to be understood by humans, and its results were to be consumed by humans, in the best ways possible.

In “Sail Away” Randy Newman exposed the American Dream as a slavery scam. But aren’t we also tricked into a kind of slavery by the promises of Big Tech? But wait, wasn’t T_EX also about sailing? How did we ever get away from that? Let’s for a while go back to the basics or “How artificial intelligence actually relates to T_EX”.

So there is the usual BachoT_EX meeting theme, and what else can it be than what closes in on us: AI? Indeed, why not embrace what everyone else seems to do: put AI on the menu and show how up-to-date we are? But do we rally need to pay attention to Artificial Intelligence? Is that why we're here? Is that what experiencing T_EX is to be about? What are we here for and who do we — the human T_EXies — serve? What is the purpose of all this? Is this the meeting where we close shop?

It is because of the friends who share a love for books and how they (can) look that I come to BachoT_EX, not because of some fancy theme. But let me anyway reflect on this, inspired by a book.

A module for drawing statistical charts in ConT_EXt will be introduced. The basis for creation of this module was the analysis of available charts and their possibilities in the commonly used spreadsheets, according to which it was decided which types of charts, subtypes and setting options will be implemented.

The individual charts are shown in examples with real data. For easy use of the module and its commands, a detailed documentation presenting all implemented elements for drawing charts has been prepared. Attention will also be paid to the accompanying module for reading values.

The first of two planned extensions to other graph types will also be shown.

First, we recall what the harmonics of a sound are, from a point of view related to Physics. Then we show that this notion is used in music, but corresponding notations are often difficult to interpret. Therefore this talk's goal is to demystify them.

A significant proportion of Computer Science students use AI tools to implement their projects, and especially to produce reports associated with such projects. We show how we try to detect this behavior.

Any typesetting system relies on two essential elements: fonts and the engine that arranges them into coherent and meaningful forms. In its early days, T_EX used bitmap fonts generated with METAFONT, which were never widely adopted outside the T_EX community. To reach a broader audience, these fonts had to be converted to commonly used formats. A major milestone was the 1992 release of Computer Modern in the PostScript Type 1 format by Blue Sky Research and Y&Y. This was a significant achievement, but it did not fully solve the problem, as emerging competing formats like TrueType and OpenType quickly appeared.

At the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries, the GUST e-Foundry team developed a font generation system that uses METAPOST as its main component. Over time, the system underwent substantial redesigns to keep pace with persistently evolving technologies and licensing requirements. The current version, named Fontplant, has reached a mature and reliable state. It generates all text fonts developed by GUST e-Foundry, i.e., Antykwa Półtawskiego, the Latin Modern family, and the T_EX Gyre collection. During the work on Fontplant, we were able to introduce some improvements to the fonts themselves.

Documentation is being finalized, with the goal of releasing Fontplant together with its METAPOST sources later this year. While no specific refinements are currently planned, experience shows that users may still propose ideas we will find hard to ignore.

Interslavic is a zonal auxiliary language created to facilitate communication among Slavic people. According to its creators — linguistics enthusiasts — sentences in Interslavic are intended to be understandable to nearly all Slavic speakers, even if they have never learned it before. I intend to discuss the history and basic features of this language, as well as the aspects necessary for typesetting texts in it using T_EX. Particular attention will be given to the hyphenation patterns I am developing.

This paper presents a T_EX-first approach to managing address data and mail merge workflows using BibLaT_EX. The proposed solution, AddressBookLite, treats a .bib file as a semantic data model rather than a simple list of references.

The core of the approach is an extensible data model (.dbx) combined with a custom formatting driver (.bbx) that produces only meaningful output lines, eliminating empty or inconsistent elements. The system architecture consists of three layers: data (.bib), formatting logic (biblatex), and a lightweight local application written in Python (Flask) for editing and validating records.

The paper also discusses the role of AI as a technical assistant in the design process, particularly in data model design, detection of semantic inconsistencies, and iterative debugging of formatting logic.

The proposed approach demonstrates that T_EX remains a powerful environment for structured data processing, and that combining T_EX, AI, and domain expertise enables flexible, portable, and sustainable solutions.

Accessibility on the web has improved considerable over the last years, with screen readers being able to read out pages without great mishaps and problems. But when it comes to mathematics and more general STEM, the situation has only very recently started to change with the introduction of MathML and its support in browsers.

In this talk we present the basics of MathML, open source tools to create it, and look at open source fonts that can be used to render MathML on the web.

arXiv is the world's largest and oldest scientific preprint server, and a champion of open science. Started in 1991, arXiv presently holds more than 2.4 million articles and is growing at an ever-increasing rate.

With over 30 years of history, arXiv contains T_EX documents that span most of the lifetime of T_EX itself. Through today, we try to be able to recompile all documents. For that, we keep multiple versions of T_EX distributions, starting from teT_EX 2 up to, currently, T_EX Live 2023.

In this talk we will report about the problems we are facing with keeping all these versions up and running, deal with the ever-increasing set of packages that get obsoleted, and all the other niceties of having to support very old software.

We will also report about our current pipelines, which tools we have settled on for watermarking, pdf concatenation, and other operations we need.

It was a dark and chilly night, and I was reading my email. I had just received one that on first glance looked like a classic scam and I almost deleted it without reading it, but after I had closed my computer I suddenly realised that it mentioned LaT_EX. I went back to that email, read it for real this time, and there was no mistaking it: it was written by real lawyers who were actually looking to hire a T_EX specialist to help them in a court case that was ongoing. I replied to the email and started a conversation that led me to be hired as a T_EX expert in court, where I gave a testimony about T_EX engines and LaT_EX packages that was scrutinised by several lawyers and a judge, the latter then rendering a judgement where the use of T_EX played a central role. This is the story of T_EX’s day in court, my involvement, the questions I was asked about T_EX, and much more.

The T_EX

The Trial

The Judgement

Word division, or hyphenation, is a topic that has kept me busy for the better part of two decades, mostly at a T_EXnical level. I have however also had the opportunity to reflect and research the more typographic and linguistic aspects of this topic, and have come to realise that English contains good examples of what choices one has to make when choosing where to put breakpoints in a word.

This talk, entitled part two, is the third part of a multi-part series that I started in 2023 in BachoT_EX. During part one and a half in 2024, the audience was invited to consider the following hyphenated words and attempt to explain them:

• crit-i-cism
• an-eu-rysm
• lig-a-ture
• sha-king
• as-tron-o-my
• as-tro-nom-i-cal
• dem-o-crat
• de-mo-cra-cy
• dem-o-crat-ic
• phe-nom-e-nol-o-gy
• e-nu-mer-ate
• pi-rate
• riv-ers
• ri-vals
• bi-son
• pris-on
• knowl-edge

• proc-ess
• proj-ect
• pres-ent

• pro-cess
• pro-ject
• pre-sent

Some of the breakpoints above may look surprising, but they are nonetheless correct according to mainstream American typographic tradition: there is a simple rule that explains them all. Everything will be revealed during my talk.

Eighteen years ago, Mojca Miklavec and myself had a conversation in BachoT_EX that sparked an effort to rationalise and improve the way hyphenation patterns were handled in T_EX Live. This talk will give a summary of that journey, and our plans for the future.

For more than fifty years I have worked with computers, including four decades with T_EX-related systems. During this time, I have accumulated large digital archives. Once they reached a certain scale, their organization and analysis became difficult without dedicated tools.

In the talk I will present the story of designing and building a tool for “digital archaeology”. I implemented it in close collaboration with ChatGPT.

I will discuss the motivations behind the project, the development process, and the role of AI, among other things, in accelerating the implementation. I will also describe how, during the work, both sides made some mistakes and how they were gradually identified. The final result proved fully successful and is now used in practice.

Part 2: Implementation

Why does math always have to look so serious? Knuth started the project because he wanted to look math great. He created an engine that still dominates today. There was a time that when you showed something done with T_EX not having math you could get demotivating comments like “Why do you use T_EX?”. The same might still happen when you show math done in T_EX that looks less standard. Although … Knuths books evolved to a nice exposure of serious text and more and more nice playful graphics.

In this talk we show a different way to present math to students, a follow up on last years lecture notes, just to keep you in the loop. We also show how math can be made to look more playful, which is for the font lovers present. We hope to make clear that not all documents produced by T_EX have to ‘scream’ T_EX. That applying a bit of human intelligence makes it fun. And, that in spite of its artificial interference, there is still a reason for humans to play with T_EX.

Around 2026 tagged PDF was a bit of a hype and AI an even bigger one. But as with all ‘at some point fancy’ features and technology one can’t predict if the hype is worth it. Just watch amazing tech from decades (or ages) ago that today is not around any more except in museums. With the two mentioned technologies it can be that the first becomes obsolete when the seconds evolves more and especially these large language models become a useful and reliable tool. We therefore want to explore the following hypothesis:

Can we just forget about (often unreliable) tagging and delegate accessibility to language models.

We will test this on some (simple) math and when we succeed we can assume (or hope) that for ordinary typeset documents the same applies. And therefore we can save us a lot of work, get less bloated files, where the bloat eventually gets ignored anyway.

The program xdvipsk extends dvips by adding support for:
(1) more flexible inclusion of bitmap images,
(2) new specials with prefixes mapline and mapfile,
(3) OpenType fonts,
(4) ToUnicode CMaps for Type 1 PostScript and OpenType fonts,
(5) Lua callbacks.

The results of our long development were recently recognized by inclusion of xdvipsk in T_EX Live 2026, so we are going to present these extensions. Our earlier paper (TUGboat 38:2 197–201) described extensions (1) and (3), this article describes changes made from that time.

The changes to xdvipsk were necessary to produce accessible publications in workflow TEX → DVI → PS → PDF. Our solution to accessibility problem required much more changes in LuaT_EX kernel and LaT_EX classes, but they are out of scope of this publication.

The minimum required for xdvipsk to function with extensions (1), (2) and (4) is to do the first workflow's step T_EX → DVI by LuaT_EX using the bundle of LaT_EX package xdvipsk-support. Then the step xdvipsk: DVI → PS provides Unicode values for all document's characters, that were included in `glyphs to unicode' maps. Some maps come from fonts (OpenType), some are built in the xdvipsk code, others must be provided externally. The final PDF result depends also on the program used in the final step PS → PDF.

Several dozen book and magazine covers created by Andrzej Tomaszewski. The examples reflect not only the author's design principles, but there will also be discussion of printing and bookbinding constraints, as well as the influence of publishers' tastes on the final form. The collection is not intended as a treatise on covers as a form of publication packaging. It is simply a personal selection of designs created over the course of 30 years.

Finally, an attempt at creating cover artwork using ChatGPT.

Participants will immerse themselves into papermaking.

Which kind of notebook is fine if you want to carry it with you all the time in a pocket or in the backpack while travelling? This workshop gives you the possibilty to make one such notebook which will survive under not most ideal conditions! We will sew the book block and add a flexible cover.

ConT_EXt has many powerful concepts. We will talk about and try out three of them. Overlays are intended for commands having the background key and represent a stacking mechanism. Buffers provide the possibilty to store blocks of information for later use. They can be typeset verbatim or executed. We will use the buffer concept in an example with layers which are another stacking mechanism. It provides the opportunity to define them to any size and the placement of information is free inside the layer.

This introduction is intended to be a hands-on session.

Participants will practice selected minuscules from the Gothic alphabet to be able to write their names and addorn them with a Lombardic capital for the initial. The resulting piece of carbdoard might be used to personalize the notebook made at Willi Egger's notebook workshop.