Articles, self-published essays, the packages on CTAN, the books, and a
record of the conferences I have been to — with the talks, where there were
talks. Entries appear here once their title, venue and year are recorded: a
citation missing any of those would be a fabricated one, so it is left off
rather than guessed at. The essays are the one group with no venue to cite,
because there was none; they are marked as self-published and must carry
the file itself instead.
This report reflects on TUG 2026 in Calgary as a whole, rather than summarising the programme presentation by presentation. It records the setting and organisation of the meeting, the technical themes that ran across the sessions — accessibility and tagged PDF, the evolving LaTeX architecture, LuaTeX-driven document automation, and typography — and the movement from research prototypes toward sustainable infrastructure. It also considers the conference as a social event and as a durable record through its recordings and proceedings, and it collects a few constructive observations for future TUG meetings.
Over the past years, I have had the opportunity to visit several TeX-related conferences and meetings, including TUG 2024–2026, GuIT 2025, DANTE 2026, BachoTeX/EuroTeX 2026, and the NTG AGMs of 2025 and 2026. This article is a personal and informal reflection on those travels: the people met along the way, the cultural differences between TeX user groups, the hallway discussions, and the surprisingly international nature of the TeX community. From technical conversations to local traditions and late-night discussions, these experiences offer a glimpse into the social side of the TeX ecosystem that often remains invisible from mailing lists and repositories.
Many documents, such as government correspondence or contracts, contain sensitive information, making them difficult to share without error-prone manual redaction. Building on earlier work on Executable Document Templates (EDTs), this talk presents a workflow in which documents evolve through distinct stages: from plain LaTeX, to parameterized templates, to fully data-driven compilation using external payloads. By separating structure, data, and context, the same source can produce both internal and redacted public versions in a reproducible way. Through a practical use case inspired by government disclosure requirements, the talk demonstrates how this staged approach enables the reliable removal of sensitive values from the PDF text layer, alongside auditing and reuse — without compromising typographic quality.
As the author of the regulatory package, I initially overlooked accessibility concerns. I later found that common dependencies bypassed LaTeX's tagging interfaces: for an earlier development snapshot, both enumitem and titlesec did so, which put PDF/UA-2 conformance — and the document structure that accessibility depends on — out of reach for a package like regulatory. LaTeX 2026-06-01 has since narrowed the gap: it now emulates much of the enumitem interface for tagged documents, whereas titlesec remains incompatible and needs an alternative implementation. This talk explores those developments — LaTeX-lab components and kernel-level mechanisms — and the structure-aware lists and sectioning they enable. Some interfaces are still experimental, but they already offer a viable path toward making packages like regulatory conform — and toward the accessibility that conformance is meant to support.
This article presents Xerdi's Documentation Project (XDP), a modular framework for scaling and simplifying LaTeX-based document production. XDP separates template logic, content, and configuration into structured components, such as Executable Document Templates (EDTs), Document Portfolios, Data Definition Repositories, and Workspaces. Leveraging LaTeX features like TEXMFHOME and TEXMFDOTDIR, it enables reusable and extensible document workflows across teams or clients. Through practical examples, it demonstrates how intertwined documents can simplify use cases like legal documents, invoices, and academic materials, and how XDP tackles responsive branding, agile development, and user-friendly input for minimal-coding authors. The framework incorporates tools such as bib2gls [9], attachfile2 [5] and zref [6] to automate complex workflows and improve document scalability.
References cited above
M. Hoftich. The make4ht package, 2025-04-14. A build system for tex4ht. https://ctan.org/pkg/make4ht
E. Nijenhuis. The lua-placeholders package, 2024-04-03. Specifying placeholders for demonstration purposes. https://ctan.org/pkg/lua-placeholders
E. Nijenhuis. The regulatory package, 2024-09-05. Flexible drafting of legal documents, especially in Dutch. https://ctan.org/pkg/regulatory
E. Nijenhuis. The gitinfo-lua package, 2024-09-14. Display git project information in your LaTeX projects. https://ctan.org/pkg/gitinfo-lua
H. Oberdiek. The attachfile2 package, 2024-01-20. Attach files into PDF output. https://ctan.org/pkg/attachfile2
H. Oberdiek. The zref package, 2025-06-08. A new reference scheme for LaTeX. https://ctan.org/pkg/zref
J. Peron, The Gregorio Project. The lyluatex package, 2023-04-18. Commands to include Lilypond scores within a (Lua)LaTeX document. https://ctan.org/pkg/lyluatex
V. Starý Novotný. The markdown package, 2025-06-24. Converting and rendering Markdown documents inside TeX. https://ctan.org/pkg/markdown
N. Talbot. The bib2gls package, 2025-05-15. Command line application to convert .bib files to glossaries-extra.sty resource files. https://ctan.org/pkg/bib2gls
N. Talbot, V. Belaïche, E. Nijenhuis. The fmtcount package, 2025-02-09. Display the value of a LaTeX counter in a variety of formats. https://ctan.org/pkg/fmtcount
In juli 2025 bezocht ik in India een workshop van het LaTeX-team over Tagged PDF. In dit artikel beschrijf ik wat ik daar leerde: waarom tagging ertoe doet, hoe tagging tegenwoordig in LaTeX werkt (met tagpdf en latex-lab, inclusief sockets en templates), welke standaarden relevant zijn (PDF 2.0, PDF/UA-2, WTPDF) en welke praktische valkuilen je in de dagelijkse praktijk tegenkomt. Tot besluit ga ik in op nuanceringen en actuele uitdagingen in de regulatory context, met name rond enumitem (lijsten) en titlesec (koppen), die de weg naar goed getagde PDF's bemoeilijken.
This article presents the gitinfo-lua package, which integrates Git information into LaTeX documents. It provides macros for document versioning, listing authors and displaying a change log, improving collaboration and traceability in software documentation.
Also published in Dutch:
Documenten in YAML specificeren en invullen met lua-placeholders in LaTeX
— MAPS 54 (2024.1), pages 15–27 (2024) ·
PDF Dit artikel bekijkt de implementatie van het factuursjabloon in GinVoice en onderzoekt hoe het factuursjabloon beter kan aansluiten bij het LaTeX-ecosysteem door de introductie van een extra datalaag in YAML met behulp van lua-placeholders. Met de introductie van lua-placeholders hebben LaTeX-gebruikers volledige vrijheid in het opmaken van factuursjablonen en zijn de factuursjablonen direct integreerbaar met de verbeterde versie van GinVoice.
This article examines the implementation of the invoice template in GinVoice [3] and explores how the invoice template can better align with the LaTeX ecosystem by introducing an additional data layer in YAML using lua-placeholders. With the introduction of lua-placeholders, LaTeX users have complete freedom in formatting invoice templates, and the invoice templates are directly integratable with the enhanced version of GinVoice.
References cited above
J. Collins, E. McLean, D.J. Musliner. The latexmk package. https://www.cantab.net/users/johncollins/latexmk/index.html
S. Dierl. The invoice2 package. https://github.com/no-preserve-root/invoice2
E. Nijenhuis. The GinVoice GTK application. https://gitlab.gnome.org/MacLotsen/ginvoice
E. Nijenhuis. The GinVoice template. https://github.com/Xerdi/ginvoice-template/tree/maps
E. Nijenhuis. The lua-placeholders package. https://ctan.org/pkg/lua-placeholders
Om 06:30 uur ging bij duizenden mensen in Noord-Nederland het noodsignaal af. Geen brand, geen overstroming, geen gifwolk — maar gladheid. Een instrument dat bedoeld is om burgers te waarschuwen bij acute levensbedreigende situaties, werd ingezet voor een risico dat voorspelbaar, seizoensgebonden en al decennialang onderdeel is van het dagelijks leven. Daarmee wordt niet alleen de grens tussen nood en ongemak vervaagd, maar ook het vertrouwen ondergraven in een systeem dat juist in uitzonderlijke omstandigheden feilloos moet functioneren. Wie het noodkanaal normaliseert, verzwakt het precies op het moment dat het er werkelijk toe doet.
On what it costs to send a national emergency alert for predictable winter weather: the incentives that reward over-warning, and the alarm fatigue that erodes the channel for the case it exists for.
This article explores the early stages of a solo entrepreneur's journey to establish a business and construct a robust digital infrastructure. It covers the careful selection of a workstation environment, the adoption of financial tools for business management, and the implementation of a private cloud for essential operations. Additionally, it discusses the creation of a secure USB stick for remote work and reflects on challenges with mobile Linux phones. While showcasing the potential of these technologies, the article acknowledges ongoing hurdles and uncertainties in achieving full functionality and government support. Through these narratives, readers gain insights into contemporary business technology adoption and innovation.
The early stages of setting up a one-person business on free software: the workstation, the financial tooling, a private cloud, an encrypted USB stick for remote work, and an honest account of where mobile Linux did not yet deliver.
Dit artikel onderzoekt de beperkingen van standaard Office oplossingen voor documentbeheer en benadrukt de noodzaak van een geavanceerde aanpak. PDF Excellence wordt genoemd als een oplossing die efficiënt samenwerken mogelijk maakt met ondersteuning voor populaire invoerformaten zoals Markdown.
Why standard office software runs out of road for document management, and what separating the data from the layout buys instead.
Rescuing my grandfather's ten-year-old Windows 7 machine from a distance, in the summer of 2020, and what it took to leave him with something that kept working.
No publisher and no date — when either exists it will say so here rather
than be implied. Not all of them can be read: an entry marked internal or classified is
listed because it exists, not because it is available. For the rest, write to erik@xerdi.com.
Dans der Planeten— Music and the orbits[in progress]
A book in Dutch about music and the motion of the planets, typeset in LaTeX. The oldest of the three, and the one furthest from the day job.
Xerdi's Documentation Project— The typesetting book[internal]
The book behind XDP: executable document templates, data and layout kept apart, and what it takes to make a document build the same way twice. It tracks a framework that is still moving, so it is never finished and stays in-house for now. The TUGboat article on intertwined documents is a chapter's worth of it.
Germen M. Haijtema worked through the typesetting problems of pharmacy compliance documents with the book alone, and no help from me. That is the test it was written to pass.
Operator's Handbook— The infrastructure book[classified]
Infrastructure as something you can hand to the next operator: the estate documented as a bound volume, with the ansible roles and shell scripts typeset from the sources that actually deploy them. It documents live systems, so it is not for circulation — listed here because it exists, not because it is available.
The method is not secret; only the estate is. Every role and script is typeset from the file that actually deploys it, with the prose living in that file as ordinary comments — so the annotated source still runs, and the book cannot drift from what is running. One chapter is an Ansible role that provisions a TeX Live mirror: the same file Ansible executes, set as prose with numbered listings. That works because a documentation comment is still just a comment. Nothing is extracted and no second copy exists, which is the part that matters — the usual literate workflow in TeX, a .dtx run through docstrip, is built to produce a package, and docstrip remains the right answer for TeX sources. An operator writes no .sty and no .cls. Their file has to run exactly as it stands, and that is the shape comment2tex is cut for. It is on CTAN, and it will annotate your infrastructure as readily as it does mine. comment2tex on CTAN.
conferences attended
Where I have been. Attending is not the same as speaking, so a talk is only
noted where there is something to point at.
Conferences attended, with date, place, and contributions.
TUG 2026
17–19 July 2026
Calgary, Alberta, Canada
Experimental lists and titling for PDF/UA-2 compliance [talk] ·
video ·
TUGboat 47:2
Executable document templates for safe and reproducible document sharing [talk] ·
video ·
TUGboat 47:2
Meeting TeX friends: Adventures across LUGs [talk] ·
video ·
TUGboat 47:2
Vice-President's report on TUG 2026 [report] ·
TUGboat 47:2
NTG AGM
29 May 2026
Utrecht, The Netherlands
BachoTeX / EuroTeX 2026
29 April – 3 May 2026
Bachotek, Poland
DANTE-Frühjahrstagung 2026
11–14 March 2026
Lahnau, Germany
GuIT 2025
5 November 2025
Pisa, Italy
GuIT meeting, Pisa 2025: A visit by Doris and Erik [report] ·
TUGboat 47:1