Much to my surprise, the DANTE Tagung took place in Karlsruhe, Germany. It appears to be the main gathering of the LaTeX (and related) community.
Besides pub-based events in the evenings, they also had talks. I knew some people on the program by name and was eager to finally see them IRL. One of those was Markus Kohm, from the KOMAScript fame. He went on to present new or less used features. One of those was scrlayer which is capable of adding layers to a page, i.e. background or foreground layers. So you can add, e.g. a logo or a document version to every page, more or less like this:
DeclareNewLayer[{
background,
topmargin,
contents={\hfill
\includegraphics[width=3cm, heigth=2cm]
{example-image}
}%
}[{Logo}
\AddLayersToPageStyle{@everystyle@}{Logo}
You could do that with fancyhead, but then you’d only get the logo depending on your page style. The scrlayer solution will be applied always. And it’s more KOMAesque, I guess.
The next talk I attended was given by Uwe Ziegenhagen on new or exciting CTAN packages.
Among the packages he presented was ctable. It can be used to type-set tables and figures. It uses a favourite package of mine, tabularx. The main advantage seems to be to be able to use footnotes which is otherwise hard to achieve.
He also presented easy-todo which provides “to-do notes throughout a document, and will provide an index of things to do”. I usually use todonotes which seems similar enough so I don’t really plan on changing that. The differences seem to be that easy-todo offer more fine grained control over what goes into a list of todos to be printed out.
The flowchart package seems to allow drawing flowcharts with TikZ more easily, especially following “IBM Flowcharting Template”. The flowcharts I drew so far were easy enough and I don’t think this package would have helped me, but it is certain that the whole process of drawing with TikZ needs to be made much easier…
Herbert Voß went on to talk about ConTeXt, which I had already discovered, but was pleased by. From my naïve understanding, it is a “different” macro set for the TeX engine. So it’s not PDFTeX, LuaLaTeX, or XeTeX, but ConTeXt. It is distributed with your favourite TeXLive distribution, so it should be deployed on quite a few installations. However, the best way to get ConTeXt, he said, was to fire up the following command:
rsync -rlpt rsync://contextgarden.net/minimals/setup/.../bin .
wow. rsync. For binary software distribution. Is that the pinnacle of apps? In 2014? Rsync?! What is this? 1997? Quite an effective method, but I doubt it’s the most efficient. Let alone security wise.
Overall, ConTeXt is described as being a bit of an alien in the TeX world. The relationship with TeXLive is complicated, at best, and conventions are not congruent which causes a multitude of complications when trying to install, run, extend, or maintain both LaTeX and ConTeXt.
The next gathering will take place in the very north of Germany. A lovely place, but I doubt that I’ll be attending. The crowd is nice, but it probably won’t be interesting for me, talk-wise. I attribute that party to my inability to enjoy coding TeX or LaTeX, but also to the arrogance I felt from the community. For example, people were mocking use cases people had, disregarding them as being irrelevant. So you might not be able to talk TeX with those people, but they are nice, anyway.
