Mar26 news: TeX Live 2026, TUG'26+more, TUG memberships, LaTeX book, CTAN

Hello TUG members,

TeX Live: we are approaching the end of the pretest for this year's TL
release. We believe the new binaries are essentially stable at this
point, and hope to make the final release shortly. If you have
time and interest, please give it a try. By default, the pretest
installation will be completely separate from any other TeX installation
that might be on a given system. For information on installing, and the
changes this year:
  https://tug.org/texlive/pretest.html

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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
tagged PDF on Thursday July 16.
  https://tug.org/tug2026/

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/

- Gutenberg - Knuth - Zapf - Lamport - LaTeX, March 19, 2026.
  Frank Mittelbach will receive an honorary doctorate from Masaryk
  University Brno, Czech Republic, for his life's work on research in
  document engineering and making LaTeX what it is today. The ceremony
  will be in the morning and he will give a talk in the afternoon. Both
  events are open to the public. Congratulations, Frank!
  https://seminarseries.muni.cz/mathematics-physics-computer-science/lectures/%CF%84%CE%AD%CF%87%CE%BD%CE%B7-gutenberg-knuth-zapf-lamport-latex-the-evolution-of-document-production-and-information-access

- 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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\'Etienne Ghys, Ecole Normale Sup\'erieure de Lyon, gave the
MAA-AMS-SIAM Gerald and Judith Porter Public Lecture at the 2026 Joint
Mathematics Meetings. The talk is entitled "The Shape of Letters: from
Leonardo da Vinci to Donald Knuth":
  https://youtu.be/1OIxzewWilc

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The 2026 TUG membership/renewal forms are available:
  https://tug.org/join
The regular membership rates are unchanged in 2026.

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/instapp

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

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The third edition of the LaTeX Beginner's Guide, by Stefan Kottwitz,
has been published. It has numerous updates and additions, such as
presentations (beamer), engines and formats, and AI tools.
  https://packt.link/n96Mx

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New CTAN packages, February 2026 (for all updates: https://ctan.org/ctan-ann):

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

- beamertheme-durham, a content-first Beamer theme for teaching, research,
  and long-form academic presentations
- cqjtuthesis, thesis template for Chongqing Jiaotong University (CQJTU)
- deutschesmuseum, LaTeX class for Deutsches Museum publications
- fariscovernew, create elegant Arabic and English title (cover) pages
- fixtounicode, setting tounicode mappings for 7/8 bit fonts
- iacrj, a document class for IACR journal publications
- jyu-chem-thesis, theses at the Department of Chemistry, U. Jyv\"askyl\"a
- lualineno, line numbering in LuaTeX-based formats
- makegobbler, keep or drop some part of LaTeX source code
- memoize-ext, extended support for memoization with Memoize
- metacapture, a package for the capture of author-supplied metadata
- milestonetimeline, making horizontal milestone timelines
- seqcalc, a package for declarative sequent-calculus proofs
- tokglobalstack, dedicated global stacks implementations
- tokgroupmark, restoring tokens after closing multiple groups
- xdvipsk-support, LuaLaTeX packages for the xdvipsk binary (dvips extension)


Happy \TeX{}ing,
Karl Berry, on behalf of the TUG Board