TUG2025: A retrospective

The 46th annual TeX Users Group conference (TUG2025) took place in Kerala during July 18–20, 2025. I’ve attended and presented at a few of the past TUG conferences; but this time it is different as I was to present a paper and help to organize the conference. This is a personal, incomplete, (and potentially hazy around the edges) reflection of my experience organizing the event, which had participants from many parts of the Europe, the US and India.

Preparations

The Indian TeX Users Group, lead by CVR, have conducted TUG conferences in 2002 and 2011. We, a group of about 18 volunteers, lead by him convened as soon as the conference plan was announced in September 2024, and started creating todo-lists, schedules and assigning responsible persons for each.

STMDocs campus has excellent conference facilities including large conference hall, audio/video systems, high-speed internet with fallback, redundant power supply etc. making it an ideal choice, as done in 2011. Yet, we prioritized the convenience of the speakers and delegates to avoid travel from and to the hotel in city — prior experience found it is best to locate the conference facility closer to the stay. We scouted for a few hotels with good conference facilities in Thiruvananthapuram city, and finalized the Hyatt Regency; even though we had to take greater responsibility and coordination as they had no prior experience organizing a conference with requirements similar to TUG. Travel and visit advisories were published on the conference web site as soon as details were available.

Projector, UPS, display connectors, microphones, WiFi access points and a lot of related hardware were procured. Conference materials such as t-shirt, mug, notepad, pen, tote bag etc. were arranged. Noted political cartoonist E.P. Unny graciously drew the beloved lion sketches for the conference.

Karl Berry, from the US, orchestrated mailing lists for coordination and communication. CVR, Shan and I assumed the responsibility of answering speaker & delegate emails. At the end of extended deadline for submitting presentations and prerecorded talks; Karl handed us over the archive of those to use with the audio/video system.

Audio/video and live streaming setup

I traveled to Thiruvananthapuram a week ahead of the conference to be present in person for the final preparations. One of the important tasks for me was the setup the audio/video and live streaming for the workshop and conference. The audio/video team and volunteers in charge did a commendable job of setting up all the hardware and connectivity on 16th evening and we tested presentation, video playing, projector, audio in/out, prompt, clicker, microphones and live streaming. There was no prompt at the hotel, so we split the screen-out to two monitors placed on both side of the podium — this was much appreciated by the speakers later. In addition to the A/V team’s hardware and (primary) laptop, two laptops (running Fedora 42) were used: a hefty one to run the presentation & backup OBS setup; another for video conferencing remote speakers’ Q&A session. The laptop used for presentation had 4K screen resolution. Thanks to Wayland (specifically, Kwin), the connected HDMI out can be independently configured for 1080p resolution; but it failed to drive the monitors split further for prompt. Changing the laptop built-in display resolution also to 1080p fixed the issue (may changing from 120 Hz refresh rate to 60 Hz might have helped, but we didn’t fiddle any further).

Also met with Erik Nijenhuis in front of the hotel, who was hand-rolling a cigarette (which turned out to be quite in demand during and after the conference), to receive a copy of the book ‘The Stroke’ by Gerrit Noordzij he kindly bought for me — many thanks!

Workshop

The ‘Tagging PDF for accessibility’ workshop was conducted on 17th July at STMDocs campus — the A/V systems & WiFi were setup and tested a couple of days prior. Delegates were picked up at the hotel in the morning and dropped off after the workshop. Registration of workshop attendees were done on the spot, and we collected speaker introductions to share with session chairs. Had interesting discussions with Frank Mittelbach and Boris Veytsman during lunch.

Reception & Registration

There was a reception at Hyatt on 17th evening, where almost everyone got registered, collected the conference material with program pre-print, t-shirt, mug, notepad & pen, a handwritten (by N. Bhattathiri) copy of Daiva Daśakam, and a copy of the LaTeX tutorial. All delegates introduced themselves — but I had to step out at the exact moment to get into a video call to prepare for live Q&A with Norman Gray from UK, who was presenting remotely on Saturday. There were two more remote speakers — Ross Moore from Australia and Martin J. Osborne from Canada — with whom I conducted the same exercise, despite at inconvenient times for them. Frank Mittelbach needed to use his own laptop for presentation; so we tested the A/V & streaming setup with that too. Doris Behrendt had a presentation with videos; its setup was also tested & arranged.

An ode to libre software & PipeWire

Tried to use a recent Macbook for the live video conference of remote speakers, but it failed miserably to detect the A/V splitter connected via USB to pick up the audio in and out. Resorting to my old laptop running Fedora 42; the devices were detected automagically and PipeWire (plus WirePlumber) made those instantly available for use.

With everything organized and tested for A/V & live streaming, I went back to get some sleep to wake early on the next day.

Day 1 — Friday

Woke up at 05:30, reached hotel by 07:00, and met with some attendees during breakfast. By 08:45, the live stream for day 1 started. Boris Veytsman, the outgoing vice-president of TUG opened TUG2025, handed over to the incoming vice-president and the session chair Erik Nijenhuis; who then introduced Rob Schrauwen to deliver the keynote titled ‘True but Irrelevant’ reflecting on the design of Elsevier XML DTD for archiving scientific articles. It was quite enlightening, especially when one of the designers of a system looks back at the strength, shortcomings, and impact of their design decisions; approached with humility and openness. Rob and I had a chat later, about the motto of validating documents and its parallel with IETF’s robustness principle.

You may see a second stream for day 1, this is entirely my fault as I accidentally stopped streaming during tea break; and started a new one. The group photo was taken after a few exercises in cat-herding.

All the talks on day 1 were very interesting: with many talks about tagging pdf project (that of Mittelbach, Fischer, & Moore); the state of CTAN by Braun — to which I had a suggestion for inactive package maintainer process to consider some Linux distributions’ procedures; Vrajarāja explained their use of XeTeX to typeset in multiple scripts; Hufflen’s experience in teaching LaTeX to students; Behrendt & Busse’s talk about use of LaTeX in CryptTool; and CVR’s talk about long running project of archiving Malayalam literary works in TEI XML format using TeX and friends. The session chairs, speakers and audience were all punctual and kept their allotted time in check; with many followup discussions happening during coffee break, which had ample time to feel the sessions not rushed.

Ross Moore’s talk was prerecorded. As the video played out, he joined via a video conference link. The audio in/out & video out (for projecting on screen and for live streaming) were connected to my laptop, and we could hear him through the audio system as well as the audience questions via microphone were relayed to him with no lag — this worked seamlessly (thanks to PipeWire). We had a small problem with pausing a video that locked up the computer running the presentation; but quickly recovered — after the conference, I diagnosed it to be a noveau driver issue (a GPU hang).

By the end of the day, Rahul & Abhilash were accustomed to driving the presentation and live streams, so I could hand over the rein and enjoy the talks. Decided to stay back at the hotel to avoid travel, and went to bed by 22:00 but sleep descended on this poor soul only by 04:30 or so; thanks to that cup of ristretto for breakfast!

Day 2 — Saturday

First talk on the second day was mine with CVR, about the development of an OpenType font with built-in syntax highlighting for TeX documents. The idea has been called ‘mad’ and ‘crazy’ (which both of us enjoyed); but we’re merely standing on the shoulders of crazy giants (see H. Lotvonen’s prior art if evidence needed.)

Judging by the ensuing laughs and questions; it appears not everyone was asleep during my talk. Frank & Ulrike suggested not to colour the underscore glyph in math, instead properly colour LaTeX3 macro names (which can have underscore and colon in addition to letters) in the font.

The sessions on second day were also varied and interesting, in particular Novotný’s talk about static analysis of LaTeX3 macros; Vaishnavi’s fifteen-year long project of researching and encoding Tulu-Tigalari script in Unicode; bibliography processing talks separately by Gray and Osborne (both appeared on video conferencing for live Q&A which worked like a charm), etc.

I had interesting discussions with many participants during lunch and coffee breaks. Mentioned to Ben Davies from Overleaf that many résumés I get nowadays are done in LaTeX, even when the person has no knowledge of it — shows signs of TeX going mainstream, in some sense. Ben agreed that it would make sense to set the first/default project in Overleaf a résumé template. I did rehash my concern shared at TUG2023, about the no-error-stop mode in Overleaf leaves much to be desired, as often I encounter documents that do not compile — corroborated by Linas Stonys from VTeX.

In the evening, all of us walked (the monsoon rain was at respite) to the music and dance concert; both of which were fantastic cultural & audio-visual experience.

Day 3 — Sunday

The morning session of final day had a few talks: Rishi lamented about eroding typographic beauty in publishing (which Rob concurred with, Vrajarāja earlier pointed out as the reason for choosing TeX, …); Doris on LaTeX village in CCC — and about ‘tuwat’ (to take action); followed by the TeX Users Group annual general body meeting presided by Boris as the first session post lunch; then on his approach to solve editorial review process of documents in TeX; and a couple more talks: Rahul’s presentation about pdf tagging used our opentype font for syntax highlighting (yay!); and the lexer developed by Overleaf team was interesting. On Veeraraghavan’s presentation about challenges faced by publishers, I had a comment about the recurrent statement that “LaTeX is complex” — LaTeX is not complex, but the scientific content is complex, and LaTeX is still the best tool to capture and represent such complex information.

Calligraphy

For the final session, Narayana Bhattathiri gave us a calligraphy demonstration, in four scripts — Latin, Malayalam, Devanagari and Tamil; which was very well received judging by the applause. I was deputed to explain what he does; and also to translate for the Q&A session. He obliged the audience’s request of writing names: of themselves, or spouse or children, even a bär, or as Hàn Thế Thành wanted — Nhà khủng lồ (the house of dinosaurs, name for the family group); for the next half hour.

Nijenhuis was also giving away swags by Xerdi, and I made the difficult choice between a pen and a pendrive, opting for the latter.

The banquet followed; where in between enjoying delicious food I could find time to meet and speak with even more people and say good byes and ‘tot ziens’.

Later, I had some discussions with Frank about generating MathML using TeX.

Many thanks

A number of people during the conference shared their appreciation of how well the conference was organized, this was heartwarming. I would like to express thanks to many people involved, including the TeX Users Group, the sponsors (who made it fiscally possible to run the event and support many travels via bursary), STMDocs volunteers who handled many other responsibilities of organizing, the audio-video team (who were very thoughtful to place the headshot of speakers away from the presentation text), the unobtrusive hotel staff; and all the attendees, especially the speakers.

Thanks particularly to those who stayed at and/or visited the campus, for enjoying the spicy food, delicious fruits from the garden, and surviving the long techno-socio-eco-political discussions. Boris seems to have taken it to heart my request for a copy of the TeXbook signed by Don Knuth — I cannot express the joy & thanks in words!

The recorded videos were handed over to Norbert Preining, who graciously agreed to make the individual lectures available after processing. The total file size was ~720 GB; so I connected the external SSD to one of the servers and made it available to a virtual machine via USB-passthrough; then mounted and made it securely available for copying remotely.

Special note of thanks to CVR, and Karl Berry — who I suspect is actually a kubernetes cluster running hundreds of containers each doing a separate task (with apologies to a thousand gnomes), but there are reported sightings of him; so I sent personal thanks via people who have seen him in flesh — for leading and coordinating the conference organizing. Barbara Beeton and Karl copy-edited our article for the TUGboat conference proceedings, which is gratefully acknowledged. I had a lot of fun and a lot less stress participating in TUG2025 conference!