Publications in 2016

R.I.P. — S.P.Q.R Sebastian Patrick Quintus Rahtz (13.2.1955–15.3.2016)

• Frank Mittelbach
  • German version published in Die Technische Komödie 2016/2.
  • English version published in TUGboat, volume 37 number 2, 2016.
  • Video recorded by River Valley TV at TUG 2016 conference, Toronto.

A memorial for our friend and colleague Sebastian who passed away far too young.

ACM DocEng 2016 Symposium on Document Engineering (Vienna, Austria)

A General Framework for Globally Optimized Pagination

Frank Mittelbach
DocEng '16 Proceedings of the 2016 ACM Symposium on Document Engineering (Vienna, Austria)

This paper presents an algorithm for globally optimized pagination using dynamic programming and discusses its theoretical background. It was awarded the “ACM Best Paper Award” at the DocEng 2016 conference. The paper is the basis for the work demonstrated at BachoTek and TUG 2016 (the order is reversed as submission deadline for DocEng was already in March but the conference was in September).

A greatly extended version of this paper (37 pages) titled “A General LuaTeX Framework for Globally Optimized Pagination” was submitted to the Computational Intelligence Journal (Wiley) in 2017 and accepted January 2018.

The above link enables free download of the paper from the ACM Digital Library. (Due to ACM restrictions it unfortunately doesn’t work from the “all-publications” page. If you are there please use the one on the pagination topic page instead.)

TUG Conference 2016 (Toronto, Canada)

Alice goes floating (slides with speaker notes intermixed)

• Frank Mittelbach
• TUG Conference 2016 (Toronto, Canada)

In this talk a framework for globally optimizing pagination of documents containing floats is demonstrated. As the main example Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll was chosen. If such a document is formatted using standard LaTeX it will result in a pagination with many issues as demonstrated here. If the same document is formatted using the new framework then one will get a globally optimized solution as shown here. At the moment the framework is still in its early stages and not yet publicly available as further research and development is needed.

Video of the talk recorded by River Valley TV: Alice goes floating (audio near the end fails unfortunately)

Exploring \romannumeral and expansion

• Joseph Wright
• Published paper, TUGboat, Volume 37 (2016), No. 1

An article by Joseph Wright on a clever use of \romannumeral to trigger controlled expansion. This is used extensively in the expl3 sources.