\centerline{\bf TUG10 \& \TeX89: edited highlights}
\smallskip
\noindent
With big meetings like these it is difficult to provide a
blow by blow account of all the papers. In any case, the
proceedings of both meetings are (or will be) available
shortly. The proceedings of TUG10 are available as
\TUGboat\ 10(4), and \TeX89 should be out ``{\it real
soon}''. \TeX89 had one or two unscheduled additions, but
these too may turn up in the proceedings.
\smallskip
\leftline{\sl TUG10}
\leftline{\sl Stanford University, August
20--23rd} 
\noindent
TUG10 was easily the biggest TUG meeting ever held --
hardly surprising when it was an anniversary meeting, at
Stanford, and with Don Knuth in attendance. Kodak ought
to have subsidised the meeting. The clicking of cameras
was a familiar background noise to Don's every
public movement. There was a good European turnout, which
may have contributed to the remarkable change of heart
experienced by \DeK. After five years of stability, \TeX\
is to change. It is difficult to know just what went on
to convince Don of the need for this -- after all, there
have been repeated suggestions made over the last ten
years  for changes (some of which surfaced in
\TeX82), but two factors are known. The first was \DeK's
trip to Norway a year or so ago, where he experienced at
first hand a few of the problems created by `foreign'
languages, and visited on \TeX; the second major factor
must be the duo of Roswitha Graham and Jan Michael
Rynning, who spend a {\it lot\/} of time with Don very
early on in the meeting. The essence of their argument is
presented elsewhere in \TeXline. I have my suspicion
that personality played a role, as well as argument.
Fortunately \DeK\ did not agree to wholescale changes
(`creeping featurism' as he later described it). The
majority of the changes are designed to enhance \TeX's
multilingual capability, although some concessions were
made to make the job of page makeup a hint or two easier
(or even `a hint or two less difficult'!).
The details of these changes are in \TUGboat\ 10(3).

In addition to these changes to \TeX, \LaTeX\ seems set
to change too, although in not particularly radical ways.
The initiative to embark on this particular evolution seems
largely due to Frank Mittelbach and Rainer Sch\"opf (who
seem to write most of \TUGboat\ these days). Frank won
the Knuth scholarship for his work on \LaTeX.

Since it was an anniversary meeting, everyone was there
-- well, not quite true, but it was possible to verify
that the following existed: Mike Spivak, Leslie Lamport,
Jill Knuth, Max D\'\i az, Arthur Keller, David Fuchs,
Neenie Billawalla\dots -- many of the names that you see
hidden somewhere in an essential Stanford report on
some aspect of \TeX ware. A rogues gallery might have
saved the rest of us the discomfort of peering at
badges and saying `Oh, so you're\dots'. Of course they
all thought I was Malcolm {\it Brown}, so they thought I
had done a grand job and were pleased to see me too (for
the email-deficient, Malcolm Brown started the {\tt
texhax} listings in their present form).

Stanford is a very pleasant campus, although the grass is
very noisily cut and trimmed. The building in which the
conference took place is now propped up after the
earthquake, although still intact. It has a covered area
around it which made it possible to have registration and
administrative details dealt with just outside, although
under cover. The crazy Brits who had never seen sun
before were all doing their No\"el Coward `heat of the mid
day sun' impersonations during the breaks.

There was also an exhibition room with various \TeX ware
distributors and developers. Phil Taylor claims that
Kinch was giving Turbo\TeX\ away, but this must have only
been to selected attendees -- I didn't see it. One of the
highlights might have been a laser printer which
understands \dvi, but it was held up in customs. By now
it may be at TUG headquarters in Providence.

If I have a criticism of the meeting, it was with the
difficulty in fitting in impromptu meetings: practically
every hour was packed with eating, conferencing,
partying, socialising\dots\ My lunch times were further
occupied with TUG Board meetings. Ah, the Board meetings.
Catapulted into one of these it is difficult to get a
grasp of what is really going on. Most of the Board are
appointees (I started out as a European coordinator
appointee, but now I'm a member by virtue of being
Chairman of uk\TeX ug -- the UK \TeX\ Users Group). I'm a
bit wary about this appointee stuff: it's not really the
weft from which democracy was woven, but as a
representative of `mad King George' in the land of the
free, it's not really my place to educate them about
democracy, is it? On the other hand, if the French
haven't excellent credentials in this area, who have? Go
to it Bernard Gaulle! (President of GUTenberg, and now
also a Board member). Back to my criticism: it really was
quite difficult to manage other informal meetings
unless you were prepared to schedule time after
midnight or before breakfast (same thing I
suppose). Some `bird's of a feather' meetings did get of
the ground towards the end of the conference. 

During the conference we `elected' a new President
(Nelson Beebe) and Secretary (Cal Jackson). I hadn't
realised the extent to which electoral systems differed.
We English speakers have this illusion that just because
we can communicate with Americans without too much
confusion, and because their pol\-itical system grew out of
the 18th century English system, that we're basically
similar. Wrong. When we're described
as `aliens' we should reflect on it and realise that we
are indeed on  another planet. There is no point
trying to understand US electoral systems from a European
stance. 

Although I won't mention every paper, one or two stand
out for one reason or another: \DeK's paper on the
`Errors of \TeX' was scheduled for about three hours.
That in itself would have been memorable. It was actually
a very entertaining and stimulating paper which
catalogued all the errors which \DeK\ had encountered in
the writing and testing of \TeX. He had categorised them
and began to draw inferences on the whole subject of
programming. On this evidence, `zero defect' software
doesn't seem very likely. Even Knuth repeated some errors.
What chance do the rest of us have?

There were good papers and not so good papers -- but the
quality is not the sole yardstick. Presenting papers
serves to identify people and is an essential part of the
communication process. Perhaps the format of the TUG
meeting discourages the little `isn't this interesting'
paper -- the ones I tend to find most useful -- and
focusses on `standard-length' papers: this often means
spinning out material beyond its breaking point. 

There was one notable innovation -- the inclusion of an
extra half day on \MF, at the beginning of the
conference. Doug Henderson's `Introduction to \MF' was
amazing as he discovered the supreme difficulty of giving
a live demo to an audience much larger than anticipated.

As the papers will show, \TeX\ continues to expand into
new areas and several participants discussed the ways in
which word processing packages could be employed as the
first stage in the \TeX\ `publishing' process. I would be
dishonest if I didn't say that I felt this to be largely
misdirected. We are still ready to accept the myth that
\TeX\ is inherently difficult. As someone who finds
getting out of WordPerfect in one piece really
mind-bogglingly bizarre and arcane, \TeX\ seems easy as
cake. Equally, few of the word processing proponents seem
to have cottoned on to \LaTeX. \LaTeX\ actually makes
life very easy for the so called naive user. We still
seem to want to teach people to change font rather than
to {\it emphasize\/}. I won't claim that \LaTeX\ is
unequivocally excellent typographically, but it's a great
deal better than your typist turned typesetter who still
insists on underlining, double spacing and all the other
gross indeciencies of typewriting. 
As a sort of antidote, there were also several papers on
the high quality end of typesetting.

There were no parallel sessions (a great relief) and few
last minute changes to the programme. As I've obliquely
mentioned above, one of the key aspects of any conference
is the social side. After all, the papers will likely all
be written up one day, but the people you meet are the real
gems of any conference. Since a large proportion of the
participants were housed in the same block of residences
(and my, they do have a spartan time at Stanford!) it was
very easy to meet and mingle in the quadrangle (despite
the limited time to do so!). If the conference seemed to
run itself painlessly and effortlessly it was because the
irrepressible Charlotte Laurendeau was skilfully joining
the ends together, papering over the cracks and holding us
all together.

Will there be another meeting at Stanford? An interesting
question. TUG meetings have been more mobile over the
last few years -- Tufts, Montreal, \TeX as. This is a
trend I would like to see continue (perhaps the 25th
anniversary should come back to Stanford!), but there may
be a danger that every meeting has to be bigger (and by
definition, better), which would tend to encourage
conservatism. If we look at the distance individual
participants come for the conference, there are many who
come from the `local' area. By taking the conference
around North America it makes it easier for local \TeX
ies to participate.
\medskip
\leftline{\sl Euro\TeX89}
\leftline{\sl Karlsruhe, September 11--13th}
\noindent
\TeX89, or Euro\TeX89 as it seemed to call itself was
truly European, but the participation from the US was
encouraging too. Since the meeting was held in Karlsruhe
there was a major German participation, and perhaps half
of the papers were from the Germany-speaking world.
Perhaps the most worrying feature was the relative lack of
French participation. Perhaps the success of GUTenberg is
siphoning off French attendees. This would be a great
pity. But the success of the `national' or `language'
groups may soon mean that the European meeting will suffer
as a result.

One or two papers resurfaced from TUG10. I'm afraid I
agreed to rehash my own `Olde Worlde \TeX' (which I had
rather hashed at Stanford -- I forgot that most of my
audience didn't actually know where the Old World --
Europe -- was); Peter Abbott gave his talk on the Aston
Archive again, Rolf Olejniczak talked about {\tt texpic}
(although it does have more features each time I hear
about it) and Don Hosek talked about designing oriental
characters with \MF. This was also the first run of Chris
Rowley's now familiar talk on `What Don said at Stanford'.
The replay of these papers is useful, since the talk
evolves, and the audience was very, very, different
(different planet, see above).

It would be a bit invidious to pick best papers, but
Mittelbach \& Sch\"opf's `With \LaTeX\ into the Nineties'
(another refugee from Stanford, but for a different
reason) clearly has much wider significance. It is a huge
relief to see the baton of \LaTeX\ taken up by these two
enormously capable, energetic and earnest enthusiasts. I
had heard from `usually reliable sources' that Leslie
Lamport had expected \LaTeX\ to die a natural death
-- `replacing the dinosaur with a small furry mammal'.
It looks as if this dinosaur has a good few millenia in
it yet, and may even evolve into a small furry dinosaur
of its own volition. (Where do we 
get the idea that dinosaurs weren't fit to survive? They
lasted a  longer than we are likely to.)

Marek Ry\'cko and Bogus\l aw Jackowski's paper on Polish
\TeX\ (or \LeX, for all sorts of reasons) was another
taste of the future. The impact of \TeX\ in Eastern
Europe is growing. The platform (of necessity rather than
choice) is the pc; hard currency is still difficult to
obtain, but public domain \TeX\ and drivers make it an
ideal tool for one of the key components of
liberalisation -- a printing press in the hands of the
people. (Another aside: when I was in Warsaw Marek and I
had an interview with the advisor to the Minister for
Culture about using \TeX\ more widely\dots). Marek won
the prize for `best paper'. I was particularly pleased by
this.

Anne Br\"uggeman-Klein's paper was, as expected
thoughtful and showed \TeX's great potential, as well as
many of the problems in `designing' documents. Standards
cropped up; first through David Rodgers talk, stressing
CALS, and then through Martin Bryan's `J\LaTeX' which
showed an application which started life as an \sgml\
document.

One other harbinger of the future might be Konrad
Neuwirth: not only was he talking about one of the nicest
personal \TeX\ implementations -- on the Amiga -- but he
was easily the youngest participant.

There was a good exhibition area with lots of vendors
(and even a peripatetic Stanford t-shirt salesperson -- I
hadn't realised that tie-dye was still around).

One interesting feature of the meeting was the
publication of the wall-news\-paper, `Backslash'. This
scurrilous example of the gutter press mysteriously
appeared each morning. Since we're in the business of
document preparation, it is surprising that this has not
happened at \TeX\ conferences before. It certainly lent a
(spurious) air of immediacy and incredibility to the
proceedings.

In summary, another useful contribution to the spread of
\TeX\ knowledge and expertise. Again, apparently
painlessly run, and with some very fine social events.
The organisers, Anne Br\"uggeman-Klein and Rainer
Rupprecht deserve much praise for this worthy successor
to \TeX88. I keenly believe that the European \TeX\
conferences are essential for the long term viability of
\TeX, TUG and \TeX-in-Europe. Without these meetings, and
without participation from the whole European catchment
we will all be a great deal poorer. I look forward to more
meetings like this one, but in Warsaw, in Budapest, in
Moscow (and, if liberalisation continues, perhaps once
again in the UK).
\rightline{\sl Malcolm Clark}
