Projekte

Der »TeX related Projects Fund« von DANTE e.V. wurde am 3. März 2001 eingeführt. Für die Projektförderung existieren die folgenden Richtlinien.

Richtlinien zur Förderung von Projekten

  • Gruppen oder einzelne Personen können eine Förderung von Projekten im weiteren Sinn beantragen. Hierbei kann es sich sowohl um Mittel handeln, die für die Entwicklung von TeX-relevanten Projekten benötigt werden oder um (Teil-)übernahme der Kosten, die für ein Entwicklertreffen anfallen oder oder oder…
  • Auf einer projektbezogenen Basis werden finanzielle Mittel für Ausgaben erstattet (Hardware, Software, Infrastruktur, Reisekosten)
  • Zahlung erfolgt nach Eingang von Quittungen bzw. nach erfolgten Vorträgen bzw. Veröffentlichungen über die Ergebnisse bzw. den Fortschritt eines Projekts.
  • Die Entscheidung über die Förderung von Projekten sowie die Förderhöhe wird vom DANTE Vorstand getroffen. Projekte können auch in Zusammenarbeit mit anderen Nutzergruppen gefördert werden.
  • Der Vorstand von DANTE berichtet bei den Mitgliederversammlungen über die geförderten Projekte.
  • Über ein gefördertes Projekt hat in der Mitgliederzeitschrift von DANTE »Die TeXnische Komödie« ein Bericht zu erfolgen.
  • Ebenfalls wird auf Einladung in der Regel ein mündlicher Bericht auf einer DANTE-Tagung verlangt. Hierzu wird ein Vertreter des geförderten Projekts eingeladen, d.h. es entstehen keine zusätzlichen Kosten und die hierfür benötigten Mittel sind nicht Bestandteil des geförderten Betrages.
  • Der Projektmitteltopf wird bei Bedarf aufgestockt.

Aktuelle Projektanträge

Keine

Bisher geförderte Projekte

Bisher wurden die folgenden Projekte gefördert. Berücksichtigt werden muss dabei, dass die genannten Beträge auch Reisekosten für die Berichterstattung über den Projektverlauf zur jeweiligen DANTE-Tagung, zusätzliche Hardwarekosten, …, die nicht über den Projektmitteltopf abgedeckt sind, beinhalten. Zudem muss bedacht werden, dass viele Projekte nicht allein von DANTE finanziert wurden.

The TeX Gyre (TG) Collection of Fonts

The project started in 2006 and will run for several years. It is an extensive remake and extension of the freely available 35 base PostScript fonts distributed with Ghostscript ver. 4.00. The important aspect of the project is providing not only the support for TeX but also the cross-platform OpenType format of the fonts.

Extended Euler Font

Konvertierung AMS Euler Type 1 Fonts in OpenType und Erweiterung
Rahmen: 3.100 €
Basisversion vorhanden, zur Zeit ruht das Projekt wegen anderer Verpflichtungen.

TEX Gyre Math Fonts

Die TEX Gyre Math Fonts sind fertiggestellt. Einen Bericht hierzu gab es bei der EuroTEX 2012 in Breskens.

Unicode Arabic OpenType Font

Rahmen: 7.500 $
Erste Rate von 3.000 $ wurde überwiesen.

DejaVu Font

Erweiterung der Monospace-Variante um mathematische Zeichen, damit sie im Editor eine brauchbare Unicode-Schrift wird.
Rahmen 4.000 €
Soll gleichzeitig ein Muster für die Font-Technologie sein beziehungsweise werden, um andere Fonts zu erweitern.

Generalizing Tool Chain For Font Extensions (Math and other)

Rahmen 6.000 €

preview-LaTeX, AUCTeX

The project started and ended in 2002. There were talks about it at the EuroBachoTeX 2002 in Bachotek, Poland, at TUG 2002 in Trivandrum, India and at DANTE2003 in Bremen, Germany. There is also a website where the results are shown and informations can be gained: http://www.gnu.org/software/auctex/preview-latex. The funded amount was 950 EUR.

7th International Lyx Developers Meeting

*LyX*, das Open-Source-Frontend zu LaTeX veranstaltet jährlich sein Developer-Meeting. Da LyX in allen Bereichen ehrenamtlich betrieben wird, besteht jedes Jahr aufs Neue das Problem einen Sponsor für das Developer-Treffen zu finden, welches dieses Jahr in Portugal stattfindet. In den vergangen Jahren übernahmen dies: in 2000 SUSE mit 1000 US$, in 2001 CCP 2000 mit 2000 AUS$. 2002 wurde das Projekt von DANTE mit 1000 EUR gefördert.

exTeX Developers Meetings

Mit 1050 EUR wurde 2005 das Treffen der exTeX-Entwickler in Pont-à-Mousson, Frankreich (EuroTeX) gefördert. Auf der Webseite http://www.extex.org/ gibt es weitere Informationen zum Projekt.

pdfTeX

I have a plan to clean up the HZ extensions: a few features have turned to be not so useful and practical and add complexity to the code, so they should be removed. And meanwhile some other features are missing to make HZ extensions easy to use. For example to use font expansion, one has to create expanded fonts manually. This task is not trivial at all. So when this can be automated, it will bring micro-typographic capabilities to every average user and not only to TeX gurus. I consider to change the code in Tone font handling to handle some limitations that have been shown recently. This will have impact on DVIPS, which uses the same module as pdfTeX does for Tone font embedding. I will also examine and merge Hartmut Henkel’s and Martin Schröder’s patches, and review changes that have been made by other contributors. I will remove some features and codes from pdfTeX to keep it stable and easy to maintain. Another version of pdfTeX, called pdfxTeX, will be made for experimenting with pdfTeX. When some feature in pdfxTeX proves to be useful and robust, it will be moved to pdfTeX. This all will become pdfTeX version 2.0. I do have a part time job at the university and getting additional work is not easy in our country. In order to be able to concentrate on the pdfTeX job. I need to dedicate a substantial amount of time. Apart from that, I need to bring my computer up to date and arrange more comfortable internet facilities. Hans Hagen told me that there is a European TeX project fund and that one can apply for a stipend. I wonder if the user groups are willing to support me for this part time job and facilities. Half a year of cheap but qualified IT work in our country is about $3000 USD including taxes and equipment. When I discussed this with Hans he suggested that I should write to NTG and DANTE e.V. to apply for funding this project. Although I think that development in the TeX community should be mostly for free, I also realize that this only works when either your boss pays for it or when you have other means to support you. However, in Vietnam academia is not strong enough to support this, although there is a growing interest in what TeX can do. I’m willing to present pdfTeX 2.0 at the 2005 EuroTeX meeting in Strassbourg, France. The project from Hàn Thế Thành was funded with 3700 EUR. More information can be found at http://www.tug.org/applications/pdftex/.

TeX Live

The project TeX Live was funded with 2500 € Total, 1000 € DANTE e.V., 1000 € GUT, 500 € NTG. You can find further information at http://tug.org/texlive/.

First Team Meeting (TeXLive/CTAN/Maintainers/LaTeX)

DANTE is participating in the production of the TeXLive CD ROMs and produces the CTAN snapshot CD ROMs for nearly all TeX users groups. In 2002 TeXLive7 contained 2 CDs, the CTAN snapshot 4 CDs, and we reached or crossed the limit where one DVD is less expensive than 4 CDs. At the same time more and more users are asking for help to make use of the software on CTAN (and CTAN CD ROMs). The installation of packages into the texmf tree is far from trivial for the average user. At the last DANTE meeting the membership ask the DANTE board to organize a meeting for the CTAN administrators, maintainers of TeX distributions and producers of TeXLive and CTAN snapshot CD ROMs. The idea is to provide a forum where these people can talk about possible improvements of CTAN. The meeting shall be held during the DANTE 2003 conference in Bremen, Germany, 2nd-4th April 2003. DANTE will cover the travel and hotel expenses for all participants. The following topics were extracted from the discussions at the DANTE meeting: * Improvement of structure of CTAN (e.g. how to improve usability; how to distinguish between frequently downloaded stuff, more exotic things and stuff mainly of „historic interest“, archive versus respository) * What are the needs of distribution maintainers (prepackaging, documentation, finance, tools, help)?? * Is it possible to force package authors to provide their packages in a way making the life for users and maintainers of TeX distributions and CD ROMs easier? * Are there ideas for a „packaging standard“ for TDS compliant distributions (e.g. starting from TPM, what about multiple texmf trees in parallel )?

Second Team Meeting (TeXLive/CTAN/Maintainers/LaTeX)

Invitation by Volker RW Schaa Dear friends, you surely remember the meeting in Bremen in April 2003. Eight month have passed, a lot of thing which have been decided had been put into action. But still there are open areas. The board of DANTE e.V. now wants to give the possiblity to meet again under similar conditions. The meeting shall be held during the DANTE 2004 conference in Darmstadt, Germany. The programme for DANTE 2004 is scheduled for 3rd-5th March 2003, with the possibility of meetings on 2nd, and 6th March (http://archiv.dante.de/dante/events/mv30/programm/zeitplan.shtml). Darmstadt is located 30km south of Frankfurt am Main.

LM Fonts Second Stage of Development

The project history Let’s summarize main issues of the project that have been accomplished so far: 1. our primary goal was to convert virtual AE fonts to Type 1 form, we considered the extending of the character set by a few characters, e.g., Euro symbol. 2. the goal evolved in time: * the major change of specification was a significant extension of the character set (at present ca. 500 per font), mainly by diacritical characters; the consequence was the change of the name of the fonts family from AE (Almost European) to LM (Latin Modern); * shortly before the meeting in Bremen, the Text Companion collection of characters was added (they need some cleaning of outlines) in response the demand from LaTeXers; additionally, LaTeX lmodern.sty and several *.fd files were prepared (by Daniel Flipo and Marcin Woliński); * another change of the specification was the introducing of a few fonts nonexistent in AE (at present we have 57 LMs, while there were 50 fonts in AE). * finally, the part of the project become the preparing of TFMs for a couple of different encodings. 3. the goal evolved in time: a report was prepared and presented during the TUG meeting at Waikoloa (Hawai’i), July, 2003. Reception of the project The reception of the LM project by LUGs is usually positive (the least interest was perhaps expressed by TUG). LM fonts have been included into the TeXLive 2003 distribution. LaTeX team considers (informally) using LM fonts as a primary collection in the future. Independently of these, the LM project has been perceived by TEX users and, in response to the spontaneous interest, Harald Harders prepared a web page with a ‘wish list for LM’ (http://dante.ctan.org/CTAN/info/lmodern/lmodern.html). Various ‘todo’s The task to be done can be splitted into four classes: 4. Obligatory To this class belongs mainly kerning and fixing main bugs (see the Harders’s web page mentioned above). Because of the extensive enhancement of the repertoire of characters, the set of kern pairs inherited after AE was certainly insufficient. Some non-existent so far kerns must be introduced (e.g., eV). Some outlines should be improved (e.g., our “favorite” euro symbol –Werner Lemberg rightly pointed out that the euro symbol should resemble rather script E than capital C). [Estimated 2500 €] 5. Required The extending of the repertoire of characters belongs here. The candidate number one is Vietnamese. [There were some suggestions as to American native scripts, but at present our knowledge is insufficient – without a help from competent typographers we would rather defer this part of the project.] Another issue of this kind would be the preparing of OpenType version of LM fonts – no doubt that tomorrow belongs to this format. [Estimated: Vietnamese – 1250 €, OpenType – 500 €] 6. Advisable This is a broad class – it includes a lot of tiny improvements, e.g., hinting (cf. Harders’s “wish list”). In this class, the most important task seems to us the releasing of the METATYPE 1 sources. This would necessitate preparing a less or more complete documentation of METATYPE 1 (AT PRESENT, it is rather less than more complete). Note that Yannis Haralambous in his new book on computer typography mentions METATYPE 1. Another task we consider advisable would be enhancing fonts with ‘caps and small caps’ glyphs. So far, we have only LMCSC10 and LMCSCO10, but they are somewhat peculiar, as their metrics is not consistent with CMR10 and CMSL10. Therefore, alternative small caps glyphs are needed which could incorporated into a basic font. In TEX, using these glyphs would require extra TFMs; in OpenType format, however, they could be conveniently used. [no estimate yet] 7. Optional (or even dubious) This class contains enterprizes that we are somewhat reluctant to undertake. An example can be math for LM. Johannes Küster offered his help – he has good experience, as he prepared (commercially) math for Adobe Minion. Other enterprizes of this kind would be the extension the repertoire of characters by Greek and Cyrillic alphabets; we would postpone this fag until indefinite future. The project was funded with 2500 EUR.

PyX Developers Meeting

*PyX* is a Python package for the creation of PostScript and PDF files. It combines an abstraction of the PostScript drawing model with a TeX/LaTeX interface. Complex tasks like 2d and 3d plots in publication-ready quality are built out of these primitives. Features 1. PostScript? and PDF output for device independent, free scalable figures 2. seamless TeX/LaTeX integration 3. full access to PostScript features like paths, linestyles, fill patterns, transformations, clipping, bitmap inclusion, etc. 4. advanced geometric operations on paths like intersections, transformations, splitting, etc. 5. sophisticated graph generation: modular design, plugable axes, axes partitioning based on rational number arithmetics, flexible graph styles, etc. Status and Availability PyX is in steady development. Planned features are listed on the roadmap. The current release, PyX 0.8+, is available at the download section of the SourceForge project page. The project was funded with 350 EUR in 2004.

Opentype Engine in Omega

Yannis Haralambous: Atif Gulzar from Pakistan is interested to do his thesis at the École Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications de Bretagne. The title of the project is ‚Implementation of an Opentype Engine in Omega‘. He will stay for 6 month in Brest starting from Sep/Oct earliest. To do his thesis at ENST he needs support in monetary form for the flight from Lahore/Pakistan to Brest/France and back. The project was funded with 1280 EUR in 2005.