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\let\Bf\bf
\centerline{\Bf R\'eflexions sur le Congr\`es GUTenberg}
\centerline{\bf Paris, Mai 16--17, 1989}
\medskip
\noindent
The French \TeX\ users group has been around for a few
years, in an `unofficial' form. Over the last year or so
they have become `official', much more active and they now
organise an annual meeting. The first well-publicised
GUTenberg meeting was held in Paris last year. I was
impressed there by the attendence (well over 100), the
stamina (the room was tiny and without air-conditioning),
and the range of topics covered. There is, in any case, a
tradition of \TeX\ activity in France -- the second
European \TeX\ Conference was held in Strasbourg, in
1986. 

This year's meeting was again in Paris, but used far
larger rooms to accommodate the 120--150 people who
attended. Scanning down the list of attendees, there
are the usual academic and research
organisations, but also publishers, and the printing trade
in general. This bodes well for the future. The meeting
was held over two days: the first day was given over to
two seminars -- one on \LaTeX\ (from Olivier Nicole and
Jacques Andr\'e), and the other on \MF\ (Victor
Ostromoukhov); followed by the AGM. The second day was the
conference proper. I attended part of Victor's `Premiers
pas en \MF'. As usual, I was impressed by Victor's breadth
and depth of \MF-lore. And he seemed to be getting
something useful across to the forty or so would be \MF
ers. Since he used a Macintosh to demonstrate the points,
there was a reasonably quick interaction between intention
and realisation. I confess I didn't stay to all of this;
my powers of concentration are not great enough to follow
a full day of technical \MF\ (far less in a foreign
tongue). However, one quote from Victor:

\centerline{\<mathematical typesetting> $\rightarrow$ 
\<empty>\|\<\TeX>}
\centerline{\<\TeX>$\rightarrow$\<\TeX82>\<font support>}

\noindent
That sums things up nicely I think.

Bernard Gaulle, GUTenberg's President ran the AGM
with great efficiency and some humour. I
particularly like the French style of democracy (it runs:
question -- `anyone against?'; answer -- `no'; conclusion
-- `passed'; excellent). I won't plough through all the
bits of the AGM, except to note that the group is in
excellent financial health, that this is a year of
anniversaries in France -- 200 years since the
Revolution, but also some others: 10 years of TUG, 50
years of CNRS (Centre Nationale de la Recherche
Scientifique), one of the homes of \TeX, and of course
this is also the year of the 4th European \TeX\ Conference.
The  AGM honoured two people with `honorary membership':
Barbara Beeton and Raymond Seroul (the author of {\sl Le
petit Livre de \TeX})). By way of recognition, they were
each presented with an edition of `Les bons Romans',
published over a hyndred years ago. Peter Abbott was also
thanked for the help he has given in easing `[les]
perturbations {\sc earn}/Bitnet'. I was particularly
pleased to see Barbara honoured and Peter thanked in this
way. The whole \TeX\ community owes them much for their
dedicated adherence to the cause, and it was particularly
refreshing and tactful that GUTenberg saw fit to include
them in this way.

Besides this conference, GUTenberg produces its own
journal, {\sl Cahiers GUTenberg}. The inaugural (or
prototype) edition (confusingly numbered `z\'ero') was
available at last year's conference. The first and
second editions were out by this year's conference. Many
of the talks in the conference were also printed in the
{\sl Cahiers} (which helped me enormously). Although the
group is `francophone', several articles are in English.
Allowing for the technical words which dictionaries never
seem to get right, it isn't too difficult to make sense
out of the papers/articles. The {\sl Cahiers} represent a
major undertaking, in time, effort, and in financial
commitment (as I well know from my own limited venture in
\TeXline). If the high standards already being established
are maintained, GUTenberg will have created something which
will be of great and lasting service to the whole \TeX\
community.  My only minor criticism of the {\sl Cahiers}
is the lack of consistency in the provision of abstracts
(a failing it shares with  TUGboat). If
abstracts were included, it would be possible to prepare
multilingual translations which could be circulated more
widely, alerting others to the range and relevance of the
material.

The major theme of the Conference was `graphics' -- a
popular one these days. Fortunately, thanks to Sebastian
Rahtz' talks at \TeX88 and \ukTuG-2, I think I know a
little about the background here. Rather than report each
talk in detail, it is perhaps more productive to try to
select some of the major themes. After all, the text of
most of the talks is available. As usual, it is notable
how far \LaTeX\ dominates in Europe (or perhaps, just
outside the US). It is also notable that `standards',
however defined, keep cropping up: X-Windows, \PS, \TeX\
itself, PHIGS, GKS, \sgml, and even {\tt emacs}. This seems
particularly healthy, although equally there are many
forays into areas which are less portable. Nevertheless,
the apparent domination of C, as the implementation
language of choice, (with or without the spectre of Unix)
would indicate the possibility of transfering some of the
applications to other platforms. From the summaries, it is
evident that one of the great concerns is the use of \PS,
and the incorporation of \PS\ (and {\sc epsf}) files into
(especially) \LaTeX. Perhaps my favourite paper was
Maurice Laugier's. His was a very simple and
straightforward idea -- namely that the pc's graphics
characters may be mapped quite easily into rules, and
that tables (and some diagrams) may be prepared by this
means, provided that a monospaced font is adequate.
And providing that your version of \TeX\ does not strip
of the eighth bit (i.e.~is non-standard).

A list of the talks, together with a brief summary (usually
the authors'/author's own) is included here. Some of the
talks were in English (a bold move for a francophone
group), and some summaries (notably that of Lance Carnes)
were distributed in English and French. Very tactful.

\talk{L'ann\'ee de tous les anniversaires}{Bernard Gaulle}
A welcome to GUTenberg, and an overview of the services
and facilities available to \TeX\ users in France (and
elesewhere); touches on the public, private and
commercial domains; addresses GUTenberg's relationship
with the rest of the world.

\talk{Xwindows, \LaTeX, \TeX draw et Plot79, ou comment
calculer, r\'ediger, dessiner et imprimer plus
ais\'ement}{Nicolas Brouard} A workstation running under
X-Windows offers a way of calculating, writing and
designing which is much simpler than with a `classic'
terminal. Two graphics tools, \TeX Draw (a public analogue
of MacDraw) and PLOT79 (a 3D graphics system based on
CORE), can easily be employed with \LaTeX.

\talk{\TeX\ and Graphics: the state of the
problem}{Nelson Beebe} Inclusion of graphics in documents
typset by \TeX\ is not yet a satisfactorily solved
problem, and no final general solution is in sight. This
paper surveys alternatives for insertion of graphics in
\TeX\ documents. It summarizes graphics primitives of
several modern software systems, and shows how \TeX\
has seriously deficient support for their direct
incorporation in \TeX\ itself.

\talk{L'environment de production de documents \TeX\ \`a
l'IRISA}{Philippe Louarn \& Bertrand Decouty} The group
consists of over 200 researchers, teachers and engineers,
who need to produce reports, articles, theses,
books\dots\ The objective was to provide a set of
homogenous tools in a heterogenous environment (Unix,
VMS, workstations, pcs\dots). Naturally, \TeX\ was chosen
as the fundamental tool. In graphics, the two main
avenues are through the incorportion of \PS, and by the
use of {\tt eepic} in the \LaTeX\ picture environment.

\talk{Survey of \TeX\ Graphics for the PC}{Lance Carnes}%
This talk reviews the various graphics systems offerings
for the IBM pc and compatibles, and the ways these
systems can be used in conjunction with \TeX; the use of
\PS, HP PCL and bitmap files in conjunction with current
\TeX\ drivers; the use of output from screen oriented
drawing systems; and the conversion of graphics files
from one format to another, and scaling of images, for
inclusion in documents.

\talk{\TeX\ et les graphiques dans l'environment
Mac}{Anestis Antoniadis} Painting and drawing are the two
sides of the creation of graphics on the Macintosh.
{\sl Paint\/} images (otherwise known as bitmaps) are known
to the Mac as a set of points on the screen. {\sl Draw}
images (also known as vector drawings) are known to the
Mac as objects (rectangles, lines, circles, polygons) and
are defined by their mathematical attributes. As a
consequence of the way in which they are defined, they
take full advantage of the resolution of  \PS\
peripheral devices. The goal of this article is to give
an overview of the methods and software for the
generation of graphics on the Mac, and to discuss the
insertion of such graphics in documents prepared with
\TeXtures, one of the implementations of \TeX\ on the
Macintosh.

\talk{\MFsl\ et \PS}{Victor Ostromoukhov} Conversion
between \MF\ and \PS\ is possible. What are the best
techniques, and what are the constraints? (No written
contribution, but see his  Mac\MF\ program.)

\talk{DDI: un environnement de travail pour la
r\'ealisation de graphiques scientifiques, techniques et
fantaisies utilisables avec \TeX}{Andr\'e Violante} DDI is
a work environment for the creation of scientific,
technical and artistic graphics. The fundamental of the
system is the creation and use of graphic fonts. To use
these, several tools are available: design software
({\tt Designcad}); a program to convert {\tt Designcad}
files to \MF; \MF\ itself; GFtoPK; \TeX; and a suitable
device driver.

\talk{{\ttit texpic}: design and implementation of a
picture graphics language in \TeX\ \`a la {\ttit pic}}{Rolf
Olejniczak} {\tt texpic} is a \TeX\ implementation of a
graphics language similar to Kerhighan's {\tt troff}
preprocessor {\tt pic}. The implmentation consists of two
parts, a set of elaborate \TeX\ macros and a postprocessor
for drawing (in the {\tt dvi} file). {\tt texpic} objects
and \TeX\ or \LaTeX\ commands may be combined at will.
{\tt texpic} is written in C, and is fully portable, to
the extent that every \TeX\ implementation, every preview
and every correctly written printer driver will work with
{\tt texpic}.


\talk{Traduction en \TeX\ d'un
fichier \sgml\  avec r\'ecup\'er\-ation des graphiques et
des tableaux}{Maurice Laugier} The logic of \sgml\  markup
is close to that of \LaTeX, and translation from  \sgml\ 
to \LaTeX\ can be realised quite simply. However, the
problem is rather different for graphics and tables. This
paper presents a way in which the PC graphics characters
were successfully mapped into \LaTeX, easing the
production of tables and simple diagrams.

\talk{GI\TeX, PAPS: deux logiciels minipulant \PS\ et
\LaTeX}{Christophe C\'erin}From pc-based graphics
programs, PAPS (Programme d'App\-lication \PS) transforms
an image into a \PS\ format. It will also allow some
manipulation of the graphics image. GI\TeX\
(G\'en\'erateur d'Image \TeX) is a program which allows a
{\tt figure} environment to be constructed for inclusion
of the \PS\ into a \LaTeX\ file.


\talk{L'incorporation de graphiques dans
INRS\TeX}{\nl Michael Ferguson} The approach used in
INRS\TeX\ is to use the power of the printer to create
graphics, and not to introduce special characters. The
capability to generate graphics has been achieved for \PS,
and for QMS graphics on a QUIC laser printer. Th paper
discusses the role of the printer as well as the need for
support software to permit the incorporation of graphics
produced by other systems. The paper also discusses some
of the limitations inherent in the choice of graphics
systems.

Like most conferences, the most interesting and valuable
discussions take place in the corridors, over coffee, or
at lunch. This tradition was maintained here. The
corridors were also used to display various pieces of
\TeX ware. The inclusion of a noticeboard for general
\TeX-notices, trivial as it seems,  was extremely useful.
There was a display of ArborText's Publisher (about the
only place you don't see Publisher these days is in the
UK), and an extensive display of books, where Raymond
Seroul's book was selling well (on its first day of
publication).


\medskip 
\leftline{\Bf Conclusion}
\medskip
\noindent
I was impressed. There can be no doubt about it,
GUTenberg provides us all with much to emulate. The
strength and coherence of the group is manifest. Taken
purely at the national (or francophone) level, GUTenberg
is contributing massively to the strength of \TeX. The
{\sl Cahiers} are excellent, and looks capable of
sustained quality. The annual meeting is now
well-established and imaginative. GUTenberg's involvement
with several French publishers must also be a good sign.

GUTenberg is also keenly aware of other French speaking
areas  (Belgium, Switzerland, Quebec) and of the
advantages of international electronic communication. And
the committee ensured that the various national
representatives (myself, representing TUG and \ukTUG;
Joachim Lammarsch, representing the German group, Dante;
and Kees van der Laan representing the Dutch group) had
the opportunity to discuss how we could cooperate for the
common good. 

I am a shade worried by what I see as the determination
to stay outside the TUG orbit. Perhaps I am over-sensitive
-- being described either as English  or Anglo-Saxon does
tend to make me a trifle testy -- but I have always
thought of TUG as an international organisation, not an
American one. Others do not share this perception. If our
conclusion is that we are not getting what we need out of
TUG, the solution is in our own hands. We can influence
the organisations in which we participate. That's the key
-- participation. \TeX\ must be worth it.

\medskip
\leftline{\Bf Joining GUTenberg;} 
\leftline{\Bf subscribing to the Cahiers} 
\medskip
\noindent
To join GUTenberg, you need only part with 200 FF. This
has two advantages (besides preparing you for 1992 and
demonstrating your adherance to the European ideal) -- it
enables you to pay a reduced fee at the annual meeting
and for the {\sl Cahiers}. To obtain the {\sl Cahiers}
costs a further 150 FF if you are a member, but 250 FF if
you are not. This year's conference cost 200 FF for
members and 400 FF for non-members. Clearly membership
pays for itself if you are contemplating attending the
conference and taking the journal. In other words,
joining GUTenberg and subscribing to the {\sl Cahiers}
costs you a total of 350 FF (made payable to GUTenberg). Of
course Eurocheques are acceptable. 

Note that membership comes in several different categories:
individual membership is 200 FF; institutional membership
on behalf of a non-profit organisation is 700 FF; while
institutional membership on behalf of profit-making (as
opposed to {\it profitable}?) organisation is a hefty 1400
FF.  On the other hand, institutional membership does
allow you to nominate up to seven individuals.

Send your money to:
{\obeylines
\quad GUTenberg
\quad c/o IRISA
\quad Campus Universitaire de Beaulieu
\quad 35042 Rennes Cedex
\quad France
}
\rightline{\sl Malcolm Clark}

