Jan26 news: Bart Childs, 2026 memberships, TUG'26 and other conferences, learnlatex.org, CTAN

Hello TeX folk - welcome to a new \year=2026!

First, we regret to report the death of long-time TeX community member
Bart Childs, literate programmer, past president of TUG, and TeX advocate
always. A memoriam will be published in the next TUGboat. He was
interviewed by Dave Walden in 2010:
  https://tug.org/interviews/childs.html

His numerous contributions to TUGboat are listed here:
  https://tug.org/TUGboat/Contents/listauthor.html#Childs,Bart

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The 2026 TUG membership forms are available now for your renewing and/or
joining pleasure:
  https://tug.org/join
The regular membership rates are unchanged in 2026. The automatic
renewals have been sent out.

For those at institutions that would like to provide significant support to
TeX and TUG, please consider the institutional and patron memberships:
  https://tug.org/forms/current/instapp.html

We greatly appreciate all our members and TeX users! Thank you!

One way that you can help keep TeX and friends strong is by helping get
the word out. We have a new poster in a variety of formats:
  https://tug.org/publicity/membership_poster_math/

It would be great if you could post this on an appropriate bulletin
board or mailing list near you. Thanks!

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TUG 2026 will take place in Calgary, Alberta, Canada,
from July 17-19 (Fri-Sun), 2026, with a LaTeX developers' workshop on
Thursday July 16.

Conference information and the registration form are now available:
  https://tug.org/tug2026/
The venue is the Alt Hotel Calgary East Village:
  https://www.germainhotels.com/en/alt-hotel/calgary-east-village

The TUG bursary is available for those needing financial assistance to
attend the conference:
  https://tug.org/bursary/

The local organizer is Max Chernoff -- thanks, Max! As always, the
conference committee is happy to provide invitation letters for visas
and any other assistance; you can email us at [email protected].

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Other upcoming events:

- DANTE spring meeting, March 12-14, 2026, at WiWa GmbH,
  Lahnau, Germany (pre-meeting get-together on March 11).
  https://www.dante.de/veranstaltungen/dante2026/

- EuroBachoTeX 2026, April 29-May 3, 2026, Bachotek, Poland.
  https://bachotex.gust.org.pl/index_en.html

- OSSConf 2026, July 1-3, 2026, University of \v{Z}ilina, Slovakia,
  will have a dedicated TeX+R session. The conference will be multilingual.
  https://ossconf.fri.uniza.sk/

- ConTeXT meeting 2026: Maibach, Germany, August 24-29, 2026.
  Theme: Focussing.
  https://meeting.contextgarden.net/2026/

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The Learn LaTeX online tutorial from the LaTeX team has acquired a Greek
translation, making it available in a total of 16 languages (so far):

  https://www.learnlatex.org/

If you or someone you know is getting started with LaTeX, or would just
like a refresher, you might give it a whirl.

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New CTAN packages, December 2025 (for all updates: https://ctan.org/ctan-ann):

Information about any CTAN package is available at
  ctan.org/pkg/PACKAGE-NAME

- awami, a collection of Awami Nastaliq fonts
- drawmgr, macros for centralized management of graphics scripts
- glossaries-ukrainian, Ukrainian language module for glossaries package
- lua-unicode-math, new/faster OpenType Math support package for LuaLaTeX
- luakeyval, a minimal key/value system for LuaTeX based on token.scan_key_cs
- monaspace-otf, OpenType MonaSpace fonts with fontspec support
- parstat, a paragraph statistics package for OpTeX
- pennstander-otf, OpenType Pennstander fonts, with math support
- pst-fourbarlinkage, draw articulated quadrilaterals
- pst-gears, drawing internal and external gears
- pst-massspring, create animations for two masses connected by a spring
- pst-nutation, rotation, precession, nutation of the earth
- pst-sphericaltrochoid, create animations of a spherical trochoid
- rwth-ci, LaTeX templates using CI of RWTH Aachen University
- xmeaning, enhanced implementation of the \meaning primitive


Happy \TeX{}ing in 2026 ($2^{11}-2\cdot11$ per DEK :) and beyond,
Karl Berry, on behalf of the TUG Board