EN in first answer.
Alle da. Wir sind startklar für die #DANTE2026 und gespannt auf Diskussionen und Vorträge rund um #TeX, & Friends. Ich würde hier drunter wieder mal ein paar kleine Zusammenfassungen der Vorträge schreiben.
Alles bisschen komisch, nachdem der Löwe und ich ja letztes Jahr so viel auslassen mussten… aber mal sehen ob wir uns wieder eingewöhnen.
Ready for #DANTE2026. Looking forward to talks and discussions about digital typesetting, open source and of course #TeX & Friends.
I will post some sumaries of the talks below this one. Thread of the German version can be found in the toot above.
Feels a bit weird … as it's the first conference since I had to skip a bunch last year … We'll see how it works out …
First talk is by @d2887 introducing WIWA (https://wiwa.de), which is our local host for the conference this year. (Thanks for inviting us!)
Afterwards @fiee is giving some technical insights into WIWAdoc, which is the #TeXLaTeX based project which creates the handbooks shown in the picture n the toot above.
The project is based on some work I did years ago… and now they do most of the adjustments internally. So I find it extremly interesting to see how it evolved.
Leistungsstarke und zuverlässige WIWA-Pumpen - seit über 70 Jahren. Als einer der weltweiten Qualitätsführer für Lackier- und Beschichtungstechniken weiß WIWA genau, worauf es ankommt: Präzision und Zuverlässigkeit. Unter höchsten Qualitätsansprüchen fertigt WIWA an seinem Gründungsstandort Lahnau, Deutschland, Geräte und Anlagen für die unterschiedlichsten Anforderungen und härtesten Einsatzbedingungen. WIWA-Technik bewährt sich in der dekorativen und protektiven Oberflächenbeschichtung wie bei der Flächenabdichtung im Tunnel- und Kanalbau oder der Verarbeitung hochviskoser, pastöser 2K- und 3K-Materialien auf Stahl und Beton.
The project ported technical documentation from InDesign to modular #TeXLaTeX workflows using a CI pipeline. Including testing as well as mechanisms to filter which modules have to be translated into a specific language. By this it's possible to minimize the effort of translators.
Additionally this introduced git based VCS and unified certifications among all products.
Questions by the audience focus on interaction between development, technical writers and translators and internal workflows.
Once again @paulocereda successfully nerd-sniped @samcarter which resultet in the cisterian #TeXLaTeX package and a lightning talk at #DANTE2026. (https://ctan.org/pkg/cistercian)
She is presenting her own package as well as the alternative xisterian (https://ctan.org/pkg/xistercian)
Ending up with a bunch of feature requests by the audience … that's how TeX conferences are … ;-)
Working on my backlog ;-)
@frischefarbe was presenting another small side project. You can check it out at https://hobby.boxesandglue.dev/ and take it as an advertisement for #Metapost which a lot of TeXies (probably including myself) might forget about from time to time.
So I guess I put it on the long lists I want to spend some more time wth … after the TODO list is finished ;-)
After lunch @fiee and @d2887 presented the #TeXConTeXt based data sheet workflow they use at WIWA including some additional tooling which simplfies debugging and avoiding mistakes.
This presentation included nice examples showing the mechanisms #LuaMetaTeX (and #LuaTeX) provide to create macros using Lua as well as the internal JSON parser.
Hans Hagen continued with visual examples of the typesetting improvements they developed for #TeXConTeXt to produce more complex layouts using column sets.
The increased flexibility is amazing and his slides also illustrate why one might want to take toddlers and twins into account when optimizing the typesetting.
I will add a link to the slides as soon as they are publshed. Guess it's better to show than try to explain ;-)
Marei
ConTeXt group