My main reason for going to the conference was to meet up with Ross Moore (http://www.maths.mq.edu.au/~ross/), hoping to re-boot our FEM project. I missed his talk (which was the first one on the first day of the conference), but he showed me what he was working on lately – “tagged PDF” – with features like these:
- substitution of Unicode characters, for glyph combinations from fonts that use encodings other than Unicode, via CMap;
- alternative text, to be read by screen-readers;
- extraction of text from PDFs in XML format;
- extraction of mathematical content, in MathML format.
It looked pretty impressive – and it is another good reason to offer PDF as a viewing format for PlanetMath (something we’ve talked about before).
We also talked some about the FEM, and he is indeed prepared to help with the re-boot – especially if the future FEM project can be combined with his tagging project. I personally think this would be a great thing to do – and as I see it, this intersects some of my ideas related to HDM, specifically, the idea of creating a “thesaurus” of “core mathematical expressions” and grammar of “core mathematical procedures” that will say what sorts of !LaTeX input should be marked up in what ways.
One FEM-related thing I did at the conference was check out the latest snapshot and see how the content looked. Apart from some errors related to pictures – !PlanetMath’s !LaTeX source code is looking very good at present. (Only 4 errors apart from those having to do with pictures – in the whole thing!)
Ross and I also talked with Frank Quinn of Virginia Tech (http://www.math.vt.edu/people/quinn/) who has started a new project called “!EduTeX” (http://edutex-wiki.tug.org/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page). (The wiki is empty at the time of this writing, but I’m planning to do some work to help set it up!) Frank Quinn’s interest with this project is to create “self-scoring and otherwise interactive PDF documents”. (The “!AcroTeX eDucation Bundle” is the start-point for this project, see http://www.math.uakron.edu/~dpstory/webeq.html)
It seemed to me that this would be another good point for future collaboration with !PlanetMath – but again, we’d want PDF as a view option.
Other than that… I talked with Nelson Beebe, who has a bibliographic database project (with rather different implementation and goals from Pitman’s BKN); I was entertained by quite a variety of other talks, particularly one on “class writing for wizard apprentices”, whose bibliography is online http://www.tug.org/tug2009/abstracts/veytsman-classes.txt; and one on self-publishing by David Walden, who uses Ames On-Demand (which is near me at 30 Dane Street Somerville, MA 02143, 617.684.1100) and Lightning Source for several self-published books – useful information if we get a good PDF of the FEM ready.
That’s about it for now – I learned a lot about !TeX, but perhaps the most useful thing I learned is that TUG’s journal has back-issues online:
TUGboat back issues: http://www.tug.org/TUGboat/Contents/listtitle.html
(There was also a talk by Paulo Ney de Souza about getting current issues into one of the for-pay electronic journal systems, so that’s coming up…)