Free Software Magazine is obviously about free software. Many readers may also know that we create our magazine using free software. But, not only do we use free software, we also develop it.

I have developed the LaTeX class that we use to typeset the individual articles and each complete issue. Even though the class isn’t very well written (it is getting there!), whenever someone asks me to provide our LaTeX class, I do send a complete starter’s kit for turning LaTeX into a magazine typesetter; well… sort of.

Yes, I am a big LaTeX fan.

In Italy we have an official TeX Users Group, based in Pisa, that holds a meeting once a year: the GuITmeeting. I was there, and this article tries to summarize what we’ve achieved.

The headquarters

The GuIT President, Maurizio Himmelmann, works with the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna (Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies). It’s not a high school—it’s an autonomous, special-statute university that operates in the fields of the applied sciences and, as the Scuola Normale Superiore, is located by the side of the University of Pisa.

The Sant’Anna School was a wonderful location to base the GuITmeeting

The Sant’Anna School was a wonderful location to base the GuITmeeting. This year’s program was rich in the variety of topics it covered, as will become clear in the following sections.

GuIT logo (drawing by Robert Duane Bibby) reproduced courtesy of GuIT

The program

The works that were presented were very interesting and showed how TeX is still vital in IT despite it being about 30 years old.

Two very famous guests had the most important contributions: Klaus Höppner, Vice President of DANTE e.V. (the German TeX users group), and Kaveh Bazargan, co-director of River Valley Technologies. Höppner had a complete report titled “Strategies for including graphics in LaTeX documents”; Bazargan presented the last “creature” of River Valley Technologies: “Batch Commander: A graphical user interface for TeX”.

Klaus’s report was interesting for the beginners, explaining the very basic commands and strategies for including graphics in LaTeX documents. However it was also interesting for the “LaTeX professionals”, since it summarized some technicalities which are not always considered, and presented a tool able to convert raster images into vector ones.

Kaveh did a run-time presentation of his program, surprisingly using a Macintosh to present slides (that weren’t written in LaTeX). Batch Commander is simply a GUI for interactively setting-up TeX (LaTeX, ConTeXt) global parameters. To tell the truth, Batch Commander is application-independent, since its author successfully applied it to POVRay too.

Kaveh Bazargan presented the last “creature” of River Valley Technologies: “Batch Commander: A graphical user interface for TeX”

After he explained some of the program’s internals, he ran it. He applied some controls to a LaTeX document, via sliders and menus (instead of editing a text file), and it was immediately clear that the controls had been applied to the document. It was impressive seeing the document changing its aspect while Kaveh changed the controls.

He also said that Batch Commander is distributed free of charge, but the question of which license is currently undecided. (Of course, I hope he’ll choose a free license.)

The other reports were presented in Italian. Luigi Scarso was the only person to talk about ConTeXt. Like LaTeX, ConTeXt is a macro package based on TeX. Since it’s younger than LaTeX, it reflects much more recent thinking about the structure of markup. In particular, it can customize its markup to an author’s language. Luigi introduced some document examples written in ConTeXt, and compiled them.

Gabriele Zucchetta, the man behind the Italian LaTeX free manual (currently being written), showed how to typeset chemical formulae using the package ppchTEX. As it was originally written as a ConTeXt extension, ppchTEX is not an original LaTeX package. All the same, users can use it with both ConTeXt and LaTeX, allowing either of the powerful typesetters to handle chemical articles amazingly well.

To aid in the typesetting of theatrical manuscripts, Massimiliano Dominici has written the package dramatist, which is much more complete than the ones available now in the Comprehensive TeX Archive Network (CTAN) [1]. He presented a report on his package—explaining how it works, its capabilities in typesetting several manuscript styles, and its still missing features.

Kaveh Bazargan (speaking) and Klaus Höppner