Week 31 of 2022

Everything

Although registered to participate in TUG 2022 (TeX User Group meeting), I couldn't attend it due to Francisco's birth. But now I'm starting to catch up on my activities and process items from my backlog. TUG 2022 is available on Youtube.
- Day 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdgjGIEvZLk
  - Nice to hear about an alternative TeX and LaTeX engine written in Rust: Tectonic. Its source code is openly available and of course, I tried it! After building it (cargo build –release), I run it against the paper for SAST. It through an error: error: amssymb.sty:261: LaTeX Error: Command `\Bbbk' already defined`. Some research on StackExchange showed it was related to the package amssymb, which was used by the .tex (but not by the .cls). As the paper did not require that package, I simply removed the dependency on that package.
- Day 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqbKgjAlNjo e https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4fwvgU-5dE
  - Nice talk by Ulrike Fischer and Joseph Wright on news about LaTeX: several improvements that make old packages obsolete! Some examples:
    - Several packages are not required anymore in latest LaTeX, as they are part of core LaTeX and UTF-8 is the default encoding: inputenc, expl3, xparse, textcomp, grffile.
    - Hook management has been improved, with new commands (\AddToHook, \DeclareHookRule, \ShowHook) and hooks everywhere (file, package, environment, command, document, paragraph, etc.
    - Several commands related to text case change were created or improved: \MakeUppercase, \MakeLowercase, \MakeTitlecase, \CaseSwitch, \AddToNoCaseChangeList
    - Some interesting packages for debugging: structuredlog.
    - Some interesting commands for debugging: \ShowCommand
    - Commands to create commands: \NewDocumentCommand, \NewCommandCopy.
    - Other interesting commands: \DeclareDocumentMetadata.
- Day 3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0TWe0adXX98
  - I learned about a LaTeX compiler in Python: https://github.com/plastex/plastex. Nice to hear about this! Most LaTeX engines are based upon original LaTeX or mix parsing and rendering. This project has a very clear distinction between parsing and rendering, which make it much more useful for text proofing and further processing.
  - Another option to LaTeX parsing is pandoc, but it is written in Haskell.