As recently announced in TUGBOAT, the twentieth annual meeting of the TEX Users Group will be held at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, British Columbia, August 15-19, 1999. We inviteTUG members (and their friends) to join us in Vancouver, and we encourage you all to consider giving a presentation and/or workshop. We would like to offer information on installing and using existing macro packages and software tools, and, of course, everyone wants to hear about new macros, new software, and new approaches to using TEX and L^ATEX. We're extending a special invitation to publishers, commercial vendors of TEX, and consultants. We'd like to hear about your services and/or products, and we'll be happy to schedule presentation time for you during the conference and to provide you with a display area.

The Program Committee would like this conference to provide worthwhile information for all segments of the TUG community. In order to meet this goal for such a diverse group, we are planning to schedule parallel sessions as part of each day's agenda. The overall scheme is to start with general discussions about the day's topics, then to continue with parallel presentations and workshops on these topics. For example, a session about the latest developments in L^ATEX could include a discussion of the problems in controlling the placement of floating tables and figures, followed by an introduction to the improved macros for handling floats. During the parallel sessions, a technical discussion about the development of the macros and a workshop giving step-by-step instruction on how to use the macros would be scheduled at the same time. We hope that this arrangement will better serve the interests of both developers and end-users.

The theme of the conference is ``TEX Online: Untangling the Web and TEX''. We are focusing on the issues involved in converting TEX/L^ATEX files to electronic formats; some of these are:

• how to convert the files;
• how to handle graphics \special's;
• what fonts are suitable for electronic formats; how to use alternate fonts; licensing issues;
• designing for the screen instead of the page.

Right now, the Program Committee wants to hear from you, so this isn't just an announcement--it's a survey. Even if you don't feel qualified to make a presentation, you do know what your current TEX problems and interests are. You can help to make the '99 meeting a success by taking the time to tell us.

Below you will find a list of suggested topics. Please take a few minutes to respond. Which of these topics best suit your current needs? Please be specific; telling us you ``like them all'' is not very helpful. We will try to design a program based on the responses to this survey--your opinion matters!

We are also planning to provide full courses the week before the conference. Again, we want to know which topics would be most helpful to you. Do you need a course in using TEX? L^ATEX? Do you need courses on using some of the supported packages? Writing macros? Would you be interested in a course on HTML? Designing for the Web?

If you're interested in giving a presentation or workshop on a suggested topic or some other related topic--or teaching a course, we especially want to hear from you.

Please reply to: TUG'99(tug99-papers@tug.org).

Thanks,

TUG'99 Program Committee

Suggested Topics