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Re: What are the chances of...

Ulrik Vieth wrote:

> Hi math font enthusiasts,
>
> after seeing yet another release of Matthias Clasen's latest partial
> implementation as of yesterday, I was wondering if it might be time
> to raise the following questions:
>
>     What are the chances of a math fonts session at EuroTeX'98
>     (March 29--31, 1998 in St.Malo, France) ?
>
> I guess that you may have seen the announcement and call for papers
> that was circulated on various places a few weeks ago, which quoted
> October 15 as the deadline for abstract submission.  This means that
> if we want to schedule a math fonts presentation and/or panel session,
> we'll have to decide about it pretty soon within the next few weeks.
>
> Of course, there a number of questions to be addressed, such as:
>
>  -  How many of us are actually planning or at least considering
>     to attend the conference and who would the participants?
>

Until now, I have neither planned nor considered it. And I'm not very
optimistic about my spare time in March.

>  -  Who, if anyone, would be willing to give a presentation and/or
>     participate in the panel session?
>

I have absolutely no experiences with conferences of this kind, so
I don't know what this means in practise.

>  -  Who, if anyone, would be willing to write up a paper for the
>     processdings?
>

I would certainly be willing to write up some text about the decisions
I have taken while going from Justin Zieglers work to the thing we have
now.

> and most importantly:
>
>  -  How much work could realistically be done until the date of
>     conference or the deadline for the final paper (February, 1)?
>

If we decide to `go public', I think that we would have to stop working
on the implementation and concentrate on documentation/presentation.

> I suppose it should be obvious that deciding to go for a public
> presentation of the current work will raise a lot of expectations.
> Most importantly, the audience will probably expect to see some
> near-fina, tidied-up and agreed upon font tables, even if some
> of the implementation details may still be in works at that time.

I think the new font tables for MX1s/MX2s/MS2 are much better wrt to
tidyness.

> Furthermore, going for a presentation combined with enough time
> for a panel discussion also means that we would have to be prepared
> that numerous issues and assumptions may be questioned and opened
> up again, leading to perhaps numerous suggestions to be considered
> for a revised encoding to be worked out after the conference.
>

I think it would be helpful to prepare a list of possible issues
which could be changed versus fundamental design decisions which
would better not be revisited. Many items for this list can probably
extracted from Justin Zieglers work and some are listed in the
TODO file.

Regards, Matthias

--
Matthias Clasen
Albert-Ludwigs-Universitaet Freiburg
Institut für Mathematische Logik
79104 Freiburg, Germany.   Tel.: +49 (0) 761-203-5606