[tlug] proposal for talk on LaTeX

["Gernot Hassenpflug" <aikishugyo@example.com>]

Hello all,

I've enjoyed the TLUG ML tremendously these last few months, also the
tech meetings, and despite my knowledge of computers being laughably
incoherent and superficial. Nevertheless, I do have some interests
that I feel strongly enough about to want to talk about in front of
TLUG members, providing of course that the content is suitable to
TLUG.

In short, I'd like to give a talk on LaTeX, that wonderful and complex
typesetting system included in virtually every linux desktop
distribution, and which has given me a lot of pleasure (and headaches)
over the last few years. In particular, I want to talk about LaTeX's
CJK capabilities, which are entirely owing to the efforts of Werner
Lemberg, a professional musician
(http://www.tug.org/interviews/interview-files/werner-lemberg.html).
My aim has been and continues to be the practical use of LaTeX for
typesetting documents in Japanese and English   (in the same
document), and using both horizontal and vertical typesetting.

For this, I have made some small contributions to the current LaTeX
CJK package, and have managed to convert arbitrary TTF fonts from MS
Windows to use with LaTeX/dvips (I also plan to use TTF fonts directly
with pdftex). What I would like to show interested members is that
LaTeX is currently quite capable of producing documents as complex
font-wise in layout as business cards and presentations, in Japanese
(and Korean and Chinese, left as an exercise to the reader) and
English (and with babel, also other, mostly European, languages), to
the same level of font content as MS Windows programs (such as Adobe
Illustrator and MS Powerpoint) are capable of accomplishing.

I'd like to hear comments and criticism on this proposal, and also I'm
happy to entertain requests for things to demonstrate (if I am capable
of doing such).

Regards,
  Gernot Hassenpflug

PS: I've sent a 1-page PDF file (117kB) with a demonstration of TTFs
to the admins. If anyone wants this, please let me know and I can
email it to you.