<html><head><meta name="color-scheme" content="light dark"></head><body><pre style="word-wrap: break-word; white-space: pre-wrap;">\centerline{\bf DANTE meeting, 12--13th October}
\smallskip
\noindent
Eichst\"att is a small university town in Bavaria, a few
hours' drive from Munich. The one delight in driving
there from Munich was passing the huge sign in Stuttgart
which says `Vorsprung durch Technik' (or something
similar), after many denials from German and English alike
that this  phrase existed, far less meant anything.
It may not mean anything, but it's good at identifying the
product. I'm sure there's a moral there for us all. This
was {\sc dante}'s 10th annual meeting. More accurately, it
is the tenth annual meeting of German-speaking \TeX\
users. {\sc dante} itself has only been in existence for
about a year or so (perhaps longer by the time \TeXline\
appears!).

The two day meeting adopted the style familiar to many
other European groups of a teaching\slash training
session immediately preceding the more general meeting.
It also had the familiar sight of Lance Carnes. I can't
remember a European meeting where Lance hasn't turned up
(usually with his presentation on what's new with Personal
\TeX). 

I'm not going to give more than impressions,
because my German is too rudimentary to follow things
very closely (the original plan was to go with Peter
Abbott, who is fluent in German, but he had other
commitments). What impressed me? The number of people,
for a start; I didn't do a head count and there seemed to
be no list of attendees, but there were easily over 50
people there, perhaps as many as a hundred. The range of
people: besides West Germany, Czechoslovakia and Austria
were represented. The Austrian representation ensured
that the next {\sc dante} meeting would be in Vienna
(20--21 March, 1991). 

I was a little worried that two German \TeX\ meetings
so close together (the Karlsruhe meeting was only a
month previously) would damage both. In the event, I do
suspect that some might have gone to one rather than
the other, but that both were reasonably well attended.
On the other hand, the logic of combining both, with perhaps
a {\sc dante} day or day-and-a-half seems inescapable.
Everyone else would get the opportunity to see this group
in action, and to benefit by their approach to problems
which beset us all.

As is becoming usual, but is still
remarkable, there is a wide range of \TeX\ usage:
commercial, academic and research. I'm less clear about
the comparative employment of \TeX\ and \LaTeX; that
didn't come through clearly, and the impressions I formed
at Eichst\"att were rather different to the ones I had
formed at Karlsruhe. 

There were many familiar faces from
Karlsruhe, including the irrepresible Christina Detig and
Joachim Schrod, Klaus Thull (of very public domain \TeX\
and \MF\ on pc fame), and Joachim Lammarsch  and Luzia
Dietsche (respectively, {\sc dante}'s Chairman and
Secretary), and one or two  presentations familiar from
Karlsruhe too. There were also many I recognized by name
and reputation.

Most of the real business seemed to get done in the
breaks and the evenings (as usual) -- this was helped by
a reasonable vendors display and the availability of a
micro to share software. But the talks and presentations
were the peg on which the whole event could turn. Wolfgang
Slaby, the local organiser did an admirable and
well-natured job in taking care of the meeting and its
participants. 

I was lucky to be driven around by a friend who works at
one of the many Max-Plank Institutes (it's a sort of
generic term for physical research). I taught her \TeX\ a
few years ago, and she now uses it exclusively in her
Institute, also passing on her expertise to the scientific
staff. She knows about \TeX\ and TUG, but not
about {\sc dante}. When I told her about {\sc dante}, which she had not heard of
before, she was slightly intimidated by the idea of a `German-speaking'
group: all {\it her} reports are in English; what did
she need (or want) with such a group\dots? More education
and information needed?

\rightline{\sl Malcolm Clark}
</pre></body></html>