[tex-live] bug: texdoc and text files

Reinhard Kotucha reinhard.kotucha at web.de
Sun Jul 13 03:33:36 CEST 2008


Norbert Preining writes:
 > On Sa, 12 Jul 2008, Werner LEMBERG wrote:
 > > Hehe, ich bin Wiener, aus dem 13. Hieb.
 > 
 > Und dann haben wir noch immer keinen Wiener TeX Stammtisch??!?!?! Gibts
 > das? Hab ich echt nicht gewu?t.

For those who don't understand German:

Werner comes from Vienna but lives in Germany for many years.  Norbert
is wondering that there are no local TeX meetings in Vienna yet.

Norbert, 
in Hannover we meet once a month at the computing services of the
University.  There is a room where a beamer is installed.  We try to
solve TeXnical problems there and afterwards we go to a restaurant for
dinner.

If you are interested in a local TeX meeting in Vienna, do this:

 1. Find someone who can organize things when you are in the wild.

 2. Ask the university for a room where a beamer is installed, maybe
    it's sufficient to negotiate with your department.

 3. Announce it on TeX related mailing lists and usenet groups.  Don't
    forget to inform local Linux user groups, they probably meet
    regularly already and have their own mailing lists.

It's not absolutely required to have a beamer but it makes solving
problems much easier.  If it's too cumbersome to organize a room with
a beamer you can meet in a restaurant.  Then you don't have to do
anything else than making announcements (and allocate a table in the
restaurant). 

My experience is that our local TeX meetings are very useful.  The
questions people have are everything but trivial.  But since we can
say "replace this by that" and are able to test it immediately,
problems can often be solved faster than by asking on mailing lists.

A month ago two guys attended the meeting who read the announcement
but didn't know anything about TeX at all.  They investigated and
found the word "text compiler" somewhere.  They wondered what it means
and decided to attend our TeX meeting.  They got a demostration and
had been deeply impressed when lines like
 
  \tableofcontents

or

  \usepackage{hyprerref}

had been added.

However, there had been people from publishing houses at our meetings
but the most interesting thing I ever encountered was this:

In Germany there are special schools for visually handicapped people.
But there had been a very interesting pilot project:
Blind pupils attend regular schools but there is one teacher who
supervises a certain amount of the visually handicapped guys and helps
if there are problems between the pupils and their regular teachers.

A blind schoolboy and his supervisor attended our meeting.  The reason
they are involved in TeX is this: You can easily typeset math formulas
in LaTeX and you can read them on a Braille line because LaTeX depends
solely on pure ASCII.  And it's easy enough to create a pdf file for the
teachers who don't even know anything about TeX.

Norbert,
these local TeX meetings are great.  If you don't have the time to
organize them yourself, please ask someone else.

In an ideal world there would be regular local TeX meetings in all
major cities around the world...  And it's not very difficult to
organize them.

Regards,
  Reinhard

-- 
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Reinhard Kotucha			              Phone: +49-511-3373112
Marschnerstr. 25
D-30167 Hannover	                      mailto:reinhard.kotucha at web.de
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Microsoft isn't the answer. Microsoft is the question, and the answer is NO.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------


More information about the tex-live mailing list