<html><head><meta name="color-scheme" content="light dark"></head><body><pre style="word-wrap: break-word; white-space: pre-wrap;">\centerline{\bf \TeX\  et les Arts Graphiques}
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GUTenberg finally decided to forsake Paris and travel out
to the provinces for its annual conference. It chose
Toulouse, the aerospace capital of Europe, for this
adventure. The conference took place on May 15--17th, at
the Universit\'e Paul-Sabatier, just outside Toulouse
itself. I can recommend Toulouse. It is a particularly
pleasant city. It's only disadvantage would seem to be
its apparent inaccessibility from Paris (and most other
places in France). (No bad thing I hear you mutter.) 

As usual there were courses before and after the
conference. The `tutorial' with Blanchard \&amp;
Mandell (two French typographers of renown) was
particularly interesting, although it did seem to me that
there are definite `cultural' colourings which make it
difficult to conceive of a `European' typography, except
in a very bland and generalised way. The introduction of
real publishers offered some needed rationalisations.

The conference itself began on the 16th, with the AGM:
like TUG, GUTenberg almost encourages you to stay away
from this, but as a member I find myself drawn
inexorably, if only to see how such matters are conducted
in another foreign country: like TUG, elections are
discouraged, and the committee\slash board is appointed,
not elected: officers seem to serve for as long as they
want: the floor does not challenge the executive
(except perhaps over the matter of the location of
GUTenberg's file server).  

Nelson Beebe gave a presentation on \TeX\ and TUG.
Michael Ferguson (with bicycle as usual) discussed some of
the aspects of \TeX3, some of its shortcomings, and some
ways ML-\TEX\ users could adopt an upwards compatible path.
Lance Carnes (another frequent attendee of GUTenberg)
scooped the vendors by having his company's versions of
\TeX3 for the pc available in a variety of attractive
shapes and sizes. There can be no doubt that Personal
\TeX\ Inc has created and is marketing a well thought out
and timely range of products.

One of the highlights of the meeting was the paper by
C\'erin \&amp; Lemaire on colour in \TeX. Some details will
be found in the abstract of their paper, given elsewhere
in \Texline. Collin, of Tr\'ema showed a range of
examples of work which his company had done for clients.
In many cases it would have been hard to see the hand of
\TeX. Tr\'ema did what the client asked, not what \TeX\
wanted to do. He did agree that there were many
challenges. One of the other highlights was Grimault's
paper which charted the difficulties her company had
encountered in using \LaTeX\ as their typesetting tool.
There was a frustrating blend of misinformation, naivety
and plain bad luck. One of the afternoon's sessions was
given to a discussion on the `possibilities of \TeX'.
This was quickly taken over by Fran\c cois Chahuneau who
came with a wide range of complaints and problems with
using \TeX\ for professional typesetting. Fiery stuff.

Since most of the papers were printed in the {\it
Cahiers} whose abstracts are printed here, it is best to
concentrate on one particular paper, that of Daniel
Taupin, who had created some superb macros to permit the
typesetting of polyphonic and instrumental music in
\TeX. This was a real tour de force. People who read
music even agreed that the typesetting was quite
acceptable (in other words, looked like what they were
used to). Fran\c cois also came back to talk about
\sgml, but he was much more restrained (who can get hot
and bothered about \sgml?). Larry Siebenmann also gave a
short talk on \LamSTeX.

In the final session, two individuals were named as
`members of honour' of GUTenberg -- Michael Ferguson (in
recognition of ML-\TEX, which is dostributed by
GUTenberg), and Nicolas Brouard, who did most of the
donkey work in creating,  copying and distributing the
GUT89 floppies, a public domain {\sc ms-dos}
implementation.

I don't know that there was much on `Graphic Arts', and
the turnout, much lower than the Paris meetings, was
disappointing, but nevertheless there were some good
papers and some good discussions. Time keeping could have
been improved, although Bernard Gaulle was stringent in
starting the sessions on time.  It would be unfortunate
if GUTenberg were discouraged from venturing out of
Paris again, although next year's meeting will be back in
Paris, on the 28th--30th of May, when the subject will
be scientific and technical publishing. 

As normal with european meetings, accommodation is never
anywhere near the conference venue, nor is it likely that
people will be in the same hotels. Nevertheless there was
still plenty of opportunity to talk to people through the
conference and in the evenings. I was pleased to see that
there were a fair few fellow `anglo-saxons', as english
speakers are quaintly described in France, some exiles
and some just trippers like myself. GUTenberg had a good
international feeling to it this year, perhaps assisted
by the simultaneous translation of the papers into
French and English (as appropriate). Despite the teething
disfficulties of getting people to talk into microphones,
this worked reasonably well.

There is however one other GUTenberg `issue' that needs
comment. Bernard Gaulle has proposed that TUGboat
should be printed in France as well as the United States.
The principal reason put forward for this is to reduce
the delivery time: the argument is that travel times
within europe are bound to be less than those from the
US, but that production costs in europe, per copy, would
be about the same, once the higher trans-Atlantic freight
charge was taken into account.

Superficially, this has
some appeal, but there are a number of problems: a second
set of plates would have to be made and sent to the
subsidiary printing location; the print run in the US
would be smaller, incurring higher unit cost there (since
a high proportion of the cost is in set-up, the unit cost
would not be simply proportional to the print run); and
would the delay be minimised? In my experience, mail from
France is no faster than trans-Atlantic mail. The
last edition of TUGboat, 11(2) reached the UK about
a week after it reached addresses in the US. I'm
sceptical that mail from France would be that much
quicker, or that the week is so important. Perhaps there
could be some speed up for those in France, but I doubt
whether any other european countries would notice the
difference. 
 
I must admit too that I would prefer to
receive the US-printed version rather than a `daughter'
copy, even if I had to wait an extra two or three days.
Since it takes me a long time to read TUGboat, and there
is seldom anything in it which is time-critical, I don't
regard its timing as crucial. I know there are those to
whom it does matter. 

I can envisage a much more exciting project: one which
allows us to exploit some of the features of \TeX:
transmit TUGboat {\it electronically\/} to a `daughter'
location, and allow the plates  to be created there for
production. I'm not thinking of each person running files
through their local laser printer -- that's silly: the
paper sizes are wrong, the resolution is limited, there
is no scope to  bind it properly: no, transmit {\tt
dvi}. There are problems here, but they are problems
whose solution gives greater credence to \TeX's claims
as an electronic interchange medium. Sending plates
(even if they were scanned at high resolution and
transmitted electronically) advances us nowhere.
\author{\mwc}

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