TeX Development Fund - Grant Criteria

Like everything else, these criteria are subject to refinement and change as the development fund evolves. As a starting point, though, following are some items by which the Development Fund Committee is guided in selecting grant recipients and amounts.

In addition to the expertise the committee members themselves may bring to the grant review process, advisors may be consulted as needed. Grant applications will be made as anonymous as possible before being sent to an advisor.

• Project audience. The more people that a project benefits, the better. But this is not to say that niche projects are not fundable; indeed, one of our hopes for the development fund is that projects which have been languishing may be revived and completed.
• Accessibility. If a project includes accessibility-related work, additional funds may be available. See the PDF Accessibility working group page for background.
• Project feasibility. One consideration is the technical question of whether the proposal can be accomplished; this is usually not an issue. Large-scale multiple-year projects must be split into year-long subprojects, for the sake of accounting and administration.
• Importance of funding. If the project will only happen with a certain level of funding, then that is clearly a factor. On the other hand, even if a project will continue due to volunteer effort (as most projects do in the TeX world), that does not disqualify it from a grant.
• Conflict of interest. A committee member with a conflict of interest for a given project (for example, if a member applies for a grant) will not participate in the funding decision for that project.

Wishlist

Some substantial projects we'd be most pleased to see undertaken; see also how to help the TeX community.

• Collaborative editing support in a TeX front end, such as TeXworks.
• Direct graphic support for more images in Dvips (jpg, tiff, etc.), i.e., interpreting bmp: specials a la PCTeX, perhaps using the bmeps library.
• More free documentation. Much of the TeX system still has no comprehensive free documentation.
• More math fonts. Only a few typefaces are available, even commercially, for math typesetting. A Braille font would be useful for the low-vision community.
• Page breaking: apply something like the same optimization to breaking pages in the document as is done for breaking lines in a paragraph. See Michael Plass' thesis Optimal pagination techniques for automatic typesetting systems, Stefan Wohlfeil's “On the pagination of complex documents”, Paolo Ciancarini et al.'s “High-quality pagination for publishing” (SPE 42:6), and discussions on texhax of the subject. Perhaps something can be done by having TeX output the boxes in the log file with \showlists, and then writing a separate program, as described in Jonathan Fine's article TeX Forever in the EuroTeX 2005 proceedings. (Research level.)
• Line breaking: an extended implementation of TeX's algorithm was implemented by Alex Holkner in his thesis Global Multiple Objective Line Breaking, as an approach to minimizing rivers, widows, hyphenations, and more (hence the “multiple objective”). The “global” is because he optimizes over the whole document, which could point toward an implementation for page breaking, as above.

It is not at all necessary for projects to be this large to be considered, though. Small projects are equally welcome.