POSTS

UK TeX User Group survives

Survival

Just two days ago the UK TeX Users Group survived its greatest threat. It was a threat to its very existence. At the AGM there was a motion to dissolve the organisation. And if passed, it would have sent all of UK TUG's funds (£13,000) to the German and US TeX User Groups.

This motion was defeated 9 votes to 20, with 7 abstentions. (Most of the votes were emailed in.) UK-TUG might not survive the next threat, which is likely to be in February or March 2020 (see below).

Problems

UK-TUG has serious problems. It's largely disconnected from the UK TeX users. Here's my evidence.

The AGM was in Oxford. There were 12 people present. Two weeks earlier, also in Oxford, 28 people signed up to hear a talk on writing a PhD thesis using LaTeX and Markdown, given by Ulrik Lyngs.

It's very likely that neither meeting knew about the other. I only discovered the first meeting, while preparing for the AGM.

Compare

UK-TUG

TeX first appeared 41 years ago. UK-TUG has an aging membership. A rough poll, and visual estimates, tells me that of the 12 people at the AGM

  • 1 was under 30.
  • 1 was over 30 and under 50.
  • Of the remaining 10, the majority were over 60.

UK-TUG, for many years, has organised only one event per year, the AGM.

Oxford RUG

The R language first appeared 26 years ago. Oxford R User Group organised the LaTeX and Markdown meeting. They have 560 members on Meetup, and have organised 21 events in 2 years. This was their first LaTeX event, it seems.

The speaker, and most of their members, seem to be much younger that the UK-TUG members.

The rivals

R Markdown

The package R Markdown describes itself as

Analyze. Share. Reproduce. Your data tells a story. Tell it with R Markdown. Turn your analyses into high quality documents, reports, presentations and dashboards

R Markdown documents are fully reproducible. Use a productive notebook interface to weave together narrative text and code to produce elegantly formatted output.

R Markdown supports dozens of static and dynamic output formats including HTML … PDF … Beamer … scientific articles … websites, and more.

LaTeX

The LaTeX project describes itself as

a high-quality typesetting system; it includes features designed for the production of technical and scientific documentation. LaTeX is the de facto standard for the communication and publication of scientific documents.

It's home page emphasises

The volunteer efforts that provide you with LaTeX need financial support, so thanks for any contribution you are willing to make.

It's clear that LaTeX is one of the many back-ends supported by R Markdown.

The future – software

There's no talk of the R user groups disbanding. The TeX user groups are in decline. The R users work and perhaps live in R notebooks. They see LaTeX as a back-end tool for typesetting, and the mathematical markup language used by MathJax.

There's no doubt that TeX (and hence LaTeX) has a long future ahead of it as a back end typesetting system. But Markdown is now surely by far more popular as a document markup language.

It's interesting the Ulrik Lyngs has a blog post on Pandoc filters, where he uses Lua to create a middleware filter, between the Markdown front-end and the LaTeX back-end, to solve a text processing problem.

It's interesting the LuaTeX provides a similar middleware use of Lua. But in LuaTeX the middleware is a layer in a monilith, that produces only PDF. But R Markdown uses Pandoc, which has a layered architecture.

(The problem was the visual indication of changes to a PhD thesis.)

The future – UK-TUG

The AGM passed a motion requiring the new committee to report progress, within 3 months, in reviving the organisation. And if insufficient progress, organise as Special General Meeting, with a motion to dissolve UK-TUG.

So the next threat to the survival of UK-TUG will probably come in February or March 2020. And much depends on the new committee. I'll post further news, from time to time.

These three months at least gives members the chance to keep some of the funds in the UK. And to get funding for UK based projects.

To discuss this, visit this forum thread.

My commitment

I've decided to spend 2–4 hours a week, for the next 12 weeks, on promoting and supporting the use of TeX in the UK. And so I'm open to requests. I'll give priority to requests, where the person asking is also giving time. I'll match that time, hour for hour (up the my weekly limit).

And I'll exert what little influence I have, to obtain funding from UK-TUG for worthwhile projects. So please contact me.

The medium is the message

The UK-TUG AGM minutes have been produced, as ever, in PDF. That's fine. PDF is good for printing. But it's not a web page. It's not easy to link to a section in a PDF. They don't work well on mobile devices.

Here are the minutes. They've not yet been published as HTML. There's still no easy way to do that sort of thing.