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\section*{A first-timer's impression of TUG95}

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Well, we've heard Malcolm Clark's view of Florida as a meeting venue,
and I'm not going to suggest that you ignore him: but it turns out
that Mimi Burbank had selected a remarkably good venue\footnote{Though
  it must be admitted that it was expensive!}, and despite the general
decline in TUG membership in general (and meeting attendances in
particular), we had a particularly jolly meeting.

What's Florida like?  Well, on my previous visit (for a standards
meeting in January 1986), the air was crisp and cool (the
orange-growers were complaining bitterly about frosts), and the
weather was unremittingly sunny.  This time, at the end of July, the
air was muggy and hot, it rained every day, and on the west coast of
Florida we only saw part of one sunset during the course of the
meeting\footnote{On the day of the excursion, the sun set between two
  hotels on a distant shore, having been shrouded in cloud up to that
  point (and the rain came again immediately afterwards)}.

The hotel backs on to the beach on the Gulf of Mexico, and the
energetic could swim at all sorts of hours (Pierre Mackay, for
example, claimed to have swum at 6am on the first day of the meeting).
The sea water was startlingly warm, which rather dulled the effect of
the hotel hot-tub that I (at least) regularly dipped in after
swimming.

And what of my personal highlights in the meeting?  Well, I (as
proceedings editor) had read most of the formal papers before they
were presented, but I was enormously impressed by T.~V. Raman's talk
about audio rendering despite that.  His argument for structured
markup is so strong as to be almost irresistible.

I delighted in the papers by Ji\v r\'\i{} Zlatu\v ska (extending Alan
Hoenig's ideas on composite logo design) and Jeremy Gibbons (dotted
and dashed lines, ending up with muskrats) on doing yet more
extraordinary things with \MF{}.  I almost never write metafont code
myself, but I still find it fascinating.

Alan Hoenig's own paper on making use of Adobe's Poetica fonts was
that rare animal, the technically interesting paper that also
expressed great beauty.

Gabriel Valiente Feruglio's passionate paper on typesetting Catalan
was presented with great wit and erudition by Pierre Mackay.  Feruglio
and Petr Sojka (on compound word hyphenation) did the conference great
service by reminding us all that we ignore support for languages other
than our own at our peril.  (I tried to make the same point in the
panel session on \Om{}, talking to a revision of what I published in
\BV{} volume~5 number~3.)

The most surprising sessions (to me) were the ones on standards (the
new \TeX{} directory structure, presented by Norm Walsh, and standards
for DVI processor specials, presented by Tom Rokicki (of |dvips| and,
now, dancing fame) and Mike Sofka.  I was also fascinated by the
discussions of journal production; the accounts of how the massive
Elsevier machine produces (and archives) its enormous range of
journals, and how the American community is slowly moving towards the
same end.  My accolade for most useful piece of work reported goes to
Sergey Lesenko: Tom Rokicki has taken up his work on partial font
downloading for a future version of dvips.  As the one who regularly
worries whether issues of \BV{} will fit on one floppy disc for
submission to the Docutech printer, I shall no doubt be able to sleep
easier in my bed in future\dots

And there was Knuth.  Knuth came because he had promised to when he
last attended.  It was, he said, the \ensuremath{2^{2^{2^{2^{-\infty}}}}}th
meeting, and who's to argue with the great man?  (Actually, I think
most mathematics lecturers would, but I'm inclined to forgive the man:
his eccentric sense of humour makes so much of his writing a real
joy.)  He gave an extended question and answer session immediately
before the sessions on \Om, \NTS{} and \eTeX: in the circumstances, he
very understandably dodged questions about ``what he would do
differently if he were starting today''.  He spent ages discussing how
he was going about typesetting errata for the first three volumes of
\textsl{the Art of Computer Programming}.  Among other errata, he has
removed Fermat's last theorem as a `research problem' and replaced it
with something about fourth powers of integers; he was obviously
delighted that the final publication of Wiles' proof of the theorem
was set in \TeX{} (and looked beautiful!).

\rightline{Robin Fairbairns}

\rightline{\texttt{rf@cl.cam.ac.uk}}
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