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\title{Report of the 1995 UKTUG AGM}
\author[R. A. Bailey\\Hon.\ Secretary, 1991--95]{R.~A.~Bailey}
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\begin{Article}
\subsubsection*{Official report of the AGM of the UK \TeX\ Users
Group, held at Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London
(Room~G2 in the School of Mathematical Sciences) on Wednesday
18~October 1995 at 1130 hours}

There were twelve members present. 
In the absence of C.~A.~Rowley, the chair was taken by S.~P.~Q.~Rahtz.
The following is a
brief summary of the business transacted; it is  categorized by,
roughly, the numbered agenda items.

\begin{enumerate}
      \item \ithead{Report of the 1994 AGM}
This report had already been published in \BV~5.1.
Copies were also available at the meeting. The report 
was received as correct.

\item \ithead{Chairman's Report} The Group's Chairman, C.~A.~Rowley, 
had sent his written report, which was read out to the meeting. It is published
following this article.


\item \ithead{Approval of Accounts}
The Treasurer, P.~Abbott, gave his report. 
Copies of the audited accounts for 
1994--95 were presented. 
These accounts appear elsewhere in this issue.

The following points were made during the discussion of the report.
%\marginpar{Peter should check these facts}
\begin{itemize}
\item The bank account had been changed to one which gave a higher rate of 
interest but on which there was a charge for cheques in excess of eight per 
month. The change gives the Group a net benefit.
\item The Committee had authorized the purchase of various equipment for Peter 
Abbott during the year so that he could carry out his duties as Membership 
Secretary and as provider of membership services such as discs and books.
\item Now that TUG is no longer paying the Group for production of TTN or \TeX 
hax, the income due from TUG to \ukt\ is not of the same order of 
magnitude as the payments due from \ukt\ to TUG. In 1995--96 it is likely 
that real money will have to be transferred from \ukt\ to TUG.
\item The accounts for the meetings in April 1995 and June 1995 are not yet 
closed.
\item \ukt\ donated some money to bursary funds to enable less well-off 
people to attend various \TeX\ user group meetings in 1995; it also gave Cathy 
Booth Memorial prizes at some of these meetings. These items of expenditure do 
not yet show in the accounts, as the financial year ended on 31~July 1995.
\item As reported in \BV~5.3, the Committee sent Robin Fairbairns as its 
delegate to the April 1995 GUTenberg meeting on the $\Omega$~project, paying 
his expenses from the Group's funds. It was not clear which heading in the 
accounts included this item.
\end{itemize}

The meeting thanked the Treasurer for his hard work on behalf of the Group.

\item \ithead{Appointment of Auditor(s)}
The Treasurer reported that Colin Smith had audited the accounts for 1994--95, 
was happy with them, and had made some helpful suggestions. The meeting gave 
formal thanks to Colin Smith and reappointed him auditor for 1995--6.

\item \ithead{Membership Fees}
The Treasurer proposed the following motion, on behalf of the committee:
\begin{quote}
\it The membership fee for 1996 shall be \pounds 20.00 for full membership or 
\pounds 10.00 for full-time student membership. 
\end{quote}

D.~P.~Carlisle then proposed an amendment: that the 
membership fee for full-time students be \pounds 5.00. The purpose of this 
amendment was to encourage students to join.
M.~Clark seconded the amendment, which was passed \nemcon. The amended 
motion was then passed \nemcon.

\item \ithead{Inducement to pay subscriptions early}
The Treasurer proposed the following motion, on behalf of the committee:
\begin{quote}
\it         Any individual member who pays his or her subscription for one
        calendar year before the end of the previous calendar year shall
        be entitled to a discount of 10\%.
\end{quote}
The motion was then passed \nemcon.

\item \ithead{Approval of  the annual subscription for institutional members} 
The Treasurer proposed the following motion, on behalf of the committee:
\begin{quote}
\it The membership fee for 1996 shall be \pounds 100.00 for institutional 
membership.
\end{quote}
This was passed \nemcon.

It was also decided that \BV\ should include a list of current institutional 
members of \ukt\ whenever it mentioned institutional membership.


\item \ithead{Announcement of new Chairman}
The Committee Secretary announced that, as a result of the election, the new 
Chairman of \ukt\ would be R.~Fairbairns. She reported details of the 
vote-counting, which have already been published in \BV~5.5.
The meeting thanked both candidates
for standing for election and B.~A.~F.~Wehrfritz for his help in counting the 
votes. 
\item \ithead{Election of Committee}
 Of the previous committee, P.~Abbott (as Treasurer), 
D.~P.~Carlisle and C.~Hewlett
continued. Of those retiring, 
M.~Clark and A.~S.~A.~Jeffrey
stood for re-election. One further nomination for 
committee membership had been received for K.~Bazargan.
These three people were all elected to the committee, bringing the total size of
the committee to six (excluding the Chair). 


\item\ithead{Report on \BV} 
S.~P.~Q.~Rahtz, 
the current editor of
the Group's newsletter \BV, gave a report on the second full year in which
\BV\ had appeared at intervals of approximately two months.
Issue~4.6, devoted to `Frequently Asked Questions' and edited by R.~Fairbairns, 
had been a great success. It had been reprinted by NTG, and translated to
appear in GUTenberg and the newsletters of CSTUG, CyrTUG and \textsc{Dante}.
%\marginpar{macros for these?}
Any FAQ  gets out of date and needs correcting, so \BV~5.6 will be a new FAQ 
issue, and it may become an annual publication.

The editor thanked all contributors to \BV, particularly R.~A.~Bailey for her 
series on `Maths in LaTeX' and M.~Clark for his ongoing `Gleanings' column. 
Having regular contributions like this gives the editor a big psychological 
boost when he starts work on each issue. He asked other members to consider 
writing regular contributions for \BV.

The editor also thanked R.~Fairbairns and J.~Fine for their sterling work in 
producing and distributing \BV. It was noted that J.~Fine had withdrawn from 
this in May 1995, since when R.~Fairbairns had carried the whole burden of both
jobs.

The editor reported 
that he cooperates with the editor of MAPS, the newsletter of NTG, 
so that MAPS and \BV\ republish articles from each other that will be of 
interest to both memberships. He recommended continued such cooperation with 
other \TeX\ users' groups.

\BV\ had figured in discussions at the annual TUG meeting in Florida in July 
1995. There had been two sessions in which the editors of the various 
newsletters exchanged information and problems. In addition, D.~E.~Knuth had been
presented with a copy of \BV: he had enjoyed reading it so much that he had 
asked for a subscription to it.

S.~P.~Q.~Rahtz had now become Secretary of TUG. He was continuing his work on 
CTAN, and so could not continue to edit \BV\ beyond the end of 1995. A new 
editor for \BV\ was therefore desperately needed.

The meeting thanked the outgoing editor for his success in making \BV\ such an 
interesting and regular publication during the two-and-a-half years in which he 
had edited it.

 \item \ithead{Topics for Meetings} 
The Meetings Secretary, M.~Clark, reported that the following meetings were in 
various stages of preparation, and welcomed any volunteers to help with their 
organization.
\begin{itemize}
\item A meeting on scientific publishing with \TeX, to involve various learned 
societies and publishers of scientific journals. This had been very much the 
idea of J.~Fine, and might not go forward now that he had left the Committee.
\item A meeting for university academic registrars
to address such issues as regulations for the appearance of 
PhD theses set in (La)\TeX. The appropriate body UCISA had been approached but 
was being slow to respond.
\item A meeting on `\TeX\ and the Internet' would definitely take place at 
Warwick University at Easter 1996.
\item There will be another joint meeting with BCSEP on portable documents. It 
will take place in January or February 1996 and will be organized by BCSEP.
\end{itemize}

The Meetings Secretary reported his disappointment at the poor take-up at 
training meetings. At Easter 1995 a training meeting had been held on MakeIndex
and BiB\TeX\ with the top trainers in each subject. In spite of members' 
expressed desire for such training, less than half a dozen people had attended 
the meeting. Why? A training meeting on emtex had been advertised for later in 
the year, but had been cancelled after only two enquiries had been made about 
it.

The meeting discussed why the attendance at the AGM is always so poor. A 
possible reason is that many potential attenders are academic staff, for whom
October is one of the busiest times of year.

The possibility of a meeting aimed specifically at publishers (and  priced 
accordingly!) was also discussed.


\item \ithead{Services to Members}
P.~Abbott reported that \ukt\ gets a steady modest income from the sale of 
books, in spite of the discount to members. It was agreed that the members' 
discount should be increased from 10\% to 20\%. The remaining 5\% still covers 
the administrative costs of the service (25\% is the discount to \ukt).

The meeting congratulated P.~Abbott on updating disc sets for emtex and sending
them out. He 
reported that the majority of requests are for emtex, \LaTeXe\ and their 
updates: their is little demand for other material from the archive.

There was some discussion of the feasibility of producing a CDROM of \TeX-ware 
for unix or for the Macintosh. It was left to the new Committee to consider 
this in more detail.

\item \ithead{Honorary Member}
It was agreed to award honorary membership to D.~E.~Knuth.

\item \ithead{Other Users' Groups}
It was agreed that one free copy of each issue of \BV\ should be sent to each 
other \TeX\ users' group.

\item \ithead{Afternoon Meeting} 
It was announced that the meeting on `\TeX\ for the 
non-technical' advertised for that afternoon had had to be cancelled, as there 
had been only five applications to attend by the deadline of one week in 
advance. The acting chairman apologized to the meeting organizers, speakers and
those who had hoped to attend the meeting.

\item \ithead{Thanks}
The meeting thanked the retiring Chairman C.~A.~Rowley for running the \UKTUG\ 
so successfully for two years, and, in particular, steering the Group through
a difficult patch. It also thanked R.~A.~Bailey for her four years' work as 
Committee Secretary.
\end{enumerate}


The meeting closed at about 1310 hours.

\end{Article}
\newpage
\title{\UKTUG\ Chair's report on 1994--95}
\author{Chris Rowley}
\begin{Article}
First, a big thank you to all my colleagues who have been on the
Committee at various times for all their hard work during the last two
years, which have certainly included some good and some interesting
times.

The continued timeliness and success of \BV\ is again due to the
inexhaustible editorship of Sebastian Rahtz, with Robin Fairbairns and
Jonathan Fine as publisher and distributor.  So, many thanks to them
and all the authors, conscious, willing or otherwise.

As part of this publishing enterprise we, by which I mean largely
Robin Fairbairns with help from several quarters, revived and updated the
\TeX{} FAQ, originally set up by Bobby Bodenheimer.  
This has been another of our
activities whose benefits are spread throughout the world and which
have made the combination of UK and \TeX{} mean `timely and useful
information' much as Peter Abbott's UK\TeX{} did \ldots\ how many
years ago is it now? 

Alan Jeffrey 
and Robin Fairbairns have
been busy making our presence felt in the vast ocean
of information on the World Wide Web, including an on-line version of
the FAQ.

Rosemary Bailey has kept things running efficiently and in line with
the constitution (as much as possible).  Recently she has been
assisted both by Malcolm
Clark, who took this on
in addition to his prime role as Meetings Officer, and by Carol Hewlett.

Four meetings were held during the year. A meeting on `What's new in \TeX?'
was held at Warwick University on 19~October 1994, after the AGM; it was  
organized by Robin Fairbairns and Malcolm Clark
%% programme organizer then local organizer
and was attended by about $20$~people.
Talks 
and demonstrations were given by 
%%alphabetical order for speakers
David Carlisle,
Angus Duggan,
Jonathan Fine,
Ulrich Jahnz and
Philip Taylor.

On $19$~January 1995 a joint meeting with the British Computer Society 
Electronic Publishing Special Group (BCS-EP)
was held at the Bridewell Theatre, Bride Lane
in London
on `Portable documents: Acrobat, SGML and \TeX'
organized by Malcolm Clark, Jonathan Fine and Carol Hewlett.
Their enthusiasm and
hard work ensured an excellent programme and
a full house (about 125 people attended). 
The speakers were
David Barron,
David Brailsford,
Jonathan Fine,
Peter Flynn,
Geeti Granger,
Martin Key and
Michael Popham.

We also had a very successful meeting on
$7$~June 1995
at Queen Mary and Westfield College, London, 
where Michael Downes from the American 
Mathematical Society provided much useful
information about the AMS's new \LaTeX{} packages. He was assisted by other
members of the \LaTeX3 project team. 
Ben Garling and Rod Mulvey explained the work being done to enable authors to 
submit papers to the London Mathematical Society as \LaTeX\ files.
At the end of the day there was a lively discussion
of many related topics in the area of mathematical typesetting.

Yet again our efforts to organise training sessions have resulted in a
lot of excellent teaching for very small audiences.  It does seem to be
difficult to match the needs of our membership in this area: could it
be that they already know everything that is to be knowed?

Much thanks are also due to Peter Abbott for running all the many services
to members, and managing to balance the books, keeping our financial
position healthy.

The UK node of the CTAN archive continues its quietly and efficiently
effective existence; this is something I personally can appreciate to
the full now that I can access it as easily as if it were physically
on my desk.  

% UPdate?
% 
Thanks for this are to Roger Needham at
Cambridge for authorizing this; and to Robin Fairbairns, Martyn
Johnson and Sebastian Rahtz for keeping it going.

Finally, I should say something about TUG and our relationship with
it.  Well, I hope not finally, but as I write we have no formal
relationship with TUG because the last three remaining Special
Directors, which included me, jointly decided that the future of the
\TeX{} community would be best served by their resigning (did they
jump or were they pushed?).  As I said about this subject a year ago,
the picture of TUG as an international organisation is still far from
clear (to me at least), but I am sure that Sebastian Rahtz, the new
secretary of TUG, will keep members of \ukt\ informed of any
developments.
\end{Article}
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