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\providecommand\CyrTUG{\acro{C}yr\tug}
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%\begin{document}
\title{\tug'96\Dash fun and profit in Dubna}
\author{Robin Fairbairns}
\begin{Article}

\section*{Travel}

I was instructed by the \UKTUG{} committee to attend \tug'96 to
represent the group.  On a flight that cost less than half as much as
\acro{BA}'s cheapest, the trip to Moscow was pretty simple.  Russian
immigration was tedious, but more ominous was the requirement to fill
in a form declaring how much foreign currency (and Roubles) we were
carrying, as well as the amount of ammunition and general weaponry,
not to mention religious icons and the like.  One has grown used to
being asked whether one is carrying weapons at the \emph{beginning} of
a flight\dots

Eventually the whole of the \tug{} board was being led by Irina
Makhovaya of \CyrTUG{} across the airport car park to find the minibus which was to take
us to Dubna.  If the ones we encountered were typical, Russian roads
are pretty awful.  The forests we drove through were predominantly
birch and pine (the proportions vary).  The birches have startlingly
bright white bark, which catches the sun; when mixed with the pines'
dark bark, the effect is really striking.  We kept passing really
fancy signs for villages, but then saw almost nothing of the villages
from the road; the sign for Dubna is a massive steel thing with
\acro{DUBNA} in 3-\acro{D} steel letters supported on wires.

Checking into the hotel was simple; we were given little chits for
each day's breakfast, and room keys with convenient bottle-openers
attached.  The meal in the hotel wasn't exactly exciting, but the
\CyrTUG\ contingent invited us for tea (in the Russian style)
afterwards; we had arrived, and were feeling welcome already.

\section*{The meeting location\Dash \acro{JINR}}

The Joint Institute for Nuclear Research, where the meeting was to be
held, is `pretty near' to the hotel, says Michel Goossens.  Actually,
by Westerners' standards, it's a fair walk.  But the centre of Dubna
is spaciously laid out in the middle of the forest, and the walk is
quite pleasant.  The contrast between the (relatively) modern
buildings and the beautiful trees and flowers was striking indeed.

There were 40\textsuperscript{th} anniversary celebrations going on,
so that there were any number of brash posters around the town, and
the hotel was teeming with Russian athletes (outnumbering the \TeX ies
by a significant proportion: the town-centre hotel that we were in was
too expensive for many of the Russian delegates).

At the entrance to the Institute is a gate-house, manned by soldiers.
On that first day, they were actually touting their automatic rifles,
but later on they accepted that we would meekly do what we were
instructed to do.  They checked our passports, and lengthily,
laboriously, checked that we were indeed in the list of people to be
allowed in without benefit of official passes.  We were taken to the
\acro{LCTA}\footnote{Laboratory of Computer Techniques and Automation}
building where the meeting was to happen, and climbed to the third
floor (of seven) for our first \tug\ board meeting.  After formally
opening business, and agreeing an agenda, most of us were dragged off
to Vladimir Korenkov's office to be interviewed by local \acro{TV}.  I
had determined to be brief (I didn't have much of a voice at the
time), but Michel and Korenkov spoke for what seemed an unconscionably
long time (in Russian).  How much of this interminable interview made
it to air I don't know: I would like to think my small contribution
made it, because I was wearing my research group's \acro{T}-shirt\dots

For lunch, we went to the Institute's canteen, and learnt how the
other half live: the food wasn't terribly classy, but it was extremely
cheap (when the conference proper started, we had a separate area with
a fixed menu: we weren't told how much this cost).

Dubna is on the banks of the Volga (it's actually near the confluence
of the Dubna river with the Volga, and takes its name from the smaller
river).  On the Friday evening we had dinner in the hotel and wandered
off to watch the sun setting over the river; we then discovered the
intriguing Pelikan bar\Dash a plastic tent with a refrigerator and a
rather loud hi-fi system; it was the nearest place we discovered that
sold Russian (as opposed to imported) beer.

\section*{The Conference}

Our Saturday was spent mostly indoors, in board meetings, eating, and
variously milling around.  Then, in the early evening registration
started, and we received our pack of conference stuff, including a
\tug'96 mug, with that curious accordion-playing Russian lion on it.
No \acro{T}-shirts on offer, though: we're told that Russians don't go
for them, and so they didn't occur to the organising committee.

Once registration was well under way, there was a little tea-party.
Russians say (we're told) ``you can have too much Vodka; you can't
have enough tea''.  The Russian method of preparing tea grows on
one\Dash I might even feel moved to use it myself: the Samovar is a
much simpler object than I'd ever imagined, and can easily be
substituted by a simple kettle.  After tea, we continue the board
meeting by the Volga, amid crowds of people enjoying the evening
sunshine.

On Sunday morning, we have the ``opening ceremony'' of the conference.
This consists of a series of grand speeches (many of them in Russian,
translated for us ignorant foreigners).  We had an intriguing history
(in English) of the institute, which was curiously old-fashioned in
tone ``the biggest \dots\ the first \dots\ the highest flux \dots{}''\@.
The fuel rods in one of their reactors stay there for 10~years!

In this abbreviated account, only a few of the more striking papers
get covered\dots
\begin{itemize}
\itemsep=0.1\itemsep
\item Yannis Haralambous gave us one of his perorations, this time on
  ligatures in Arabic.  Yannis is \emph{so} erudite, but when he goes
  off on one of these tacks about the \ae{}sthetics of typesetting
  it's hard to keep up with him (though I find him totally fascinating).
%
\item Karel Piska (who says he's a sort of ``collector of alphabets'')
  spoke about the usage of Cyrillic alphabets, the paths through which
  they came to it, and the problems that arise from their slightly
  different treatment of the alphabet itself.
%
\item Sergei Znamenskii discussed the issues arising from the different
  standard encodings in use for Cyrillic throughout Russia.  This was a
  repeating issue for the conference; how does one exchange
  information between systems, given that there are all these
  different encodings in use.  The normal ones are \acro{KOI}-8 (the
  `8' being pronounced in Russian as `vosyem': a standard from the
  `old days'), \acro{ISO}~8859-5, and two Microsoft code pages.
  Reading a file written in one code as if it were in another can
  often produce a \emph{partly} sensible result, but it's obviously
  never going to be acceptable.
%
\item J\"org Knappen spoke on his latest version of the \acro{DC}
  fonts, pushing his message of stability in advance of the release of
  the final `\acro{EC}' version\footnote{Which has since been
    released}.  He also discussed the text companion fonts, which
  contain symbols whose appearance should reasonably change to match
  the surrounding text font.  J\"org requested samples for additional
  symbols for these \acro{TC} fonts.
%
\item J\"org also presented Fukui Rei's paper on the new \acro{TIPA}
  phonetic fonts: an impressive piece of work, with accompanying
  macros that permit straightforward use.  Rei's encoding has been
  adopted as a \LaTeX{} standard (\acro{T}3).
%
\item Olga Lapko spoke about the encoding problems that confront the
  font-designer who aims to support Cyrillic; the background to the
  problem is the vast range of languages that Cyrillic covers, another
  aspect of the subject that Karel Piska was addressing.
\end{itemize}

\section*{Monday, and how not to chair a session}

Monday was the one appearance I made on the podium.  This could have
been difficult (I had no voice) but I could make myself understood by
using the microphone.  The session was thrown into complete
confusion because I had an incorrect version of the session timetable
(I never found out why), with more time allowed for Yannis Haralambous
(on his new fonts) and less allowed for Richard Kinch (on Unicode
encoding issues) than either was expecting.  So I had to extemporise a
short discussion period at the end of the session, on encodings.  This
discussion didn't really get off the ground; I had noted several
questions I wanted to ask of the morning's speakers, but no-one else
(apparently) had done so.  And when I had asked all my questions and
had answers to them, the session (sort of) dried up\dots

The afternoon was rounded off by the \acro{TUG} business
meeting, at the start of which J\"org Knappen led 
a group of Russians out, to discuss the planned \LaTeX{}
\acro{T}2 encoding for Cyrillic.  (This was the one major question I
had failed to get under way in my extempore discussion session.)
Michel's presentation seemed to go down reasonably well with the
members, and there was some discussion, but it was curtailed by an
urgent summons to the canteen for dinner.

And so back to the hotel, whence to the Pelikan for a beer to drink by
the banks of the Volga, finding and skimming stones (there are rather
few stones of any sort, let along flat ones, since it's not a sea
shore, for all its sandiness).  And when the sun's set too far to
continue, back to the Pelikan to sit with a group of other delegates,
drink a final beer, and shout conversations over the loud music and to
the accompaniment of a drunken dancer who occasionally lunged at
people in a sort of conversational way (and invariably missed).

\section*{Sergiev Posad\Dash the \emph{big trip}}

Tuesday morning's session was short (\emph{and} I was late for it,
having been told the first speaker hadn't arrived).  Laurent Siebenman
was speaking when I arrived about the concept of using \acro{DVI} as a
document distribution medium, but of course I missed some of his
reasoning.  I'm sceptical.

Then off to a slightly-hurried early lunch and thence to Sergiev Posad
by bus.  It's a major centre of the Russian Orthodox Church, including
a monastery, a seminary, etc.  Our tour took in three `cathedrals' and
a museum which included some beautiful illuminated manuscript books.

Our journey back was far from smooth\Dash a startlingly loud puncture
delaayed us for ages.  But when we got back to the hotel, we found
that a call has gone ahead of us to \acro{JINR}, and our dinner has
been put in huge pots and brought to the hotel.  We ate it as a picnic
on a bit of meadow land between the hotel and the Volga.

\section*{And how do you follow that?}

The Wednesday morning started with \emph{two} papers from Kees van der
Laan: I never know what to make of this man\dots

The first paper is on how to do (what seem to me) trivial graphics in
\TeX{} (native) using the good old `turtle' model.  This is fun, but
isn't taking us anywhere much: who gets to using \TeX{} when they're
still of an age to need turtle graphics?  (Native) graphics in \TeX{}
\emph{are} a problem, but there are reasonable solutions in a variety
of areas, and almost anyone nowadays will go to encapsulated
PostScript for anything of any significance.

Kees' second paper develops from one single idea: that of doing \MF{}
(or \MP) graphics in three dimensions and imposing a projection
transformation at a late stage.  This is neat, but he doesn't seem to
be thinking of anything but decorative effects.

The rest of the morning (after the coffee break) is taken up with two
new \acro{PDF}-related projects.  The first presentation, of
\TeXtoPDF\footnote{See the paper elsewhere in this issue} is by Petr
Sojka.  \TeXtoPDF{} provides an alternative
output mechanism (as a change file on the sources) which creates
\acro{PDF} output in place of \acro{DVI}.  This is, of course, the
\emph{right way} to do a hypertext-ish output; hypertext inevitably
suffers from the same problems of context as the colour package, which
we're familiar with from David Carlisle's accounts.  Knuth spoke at
\acro{TUG}'95 of his surprise that so few people have used \TeX{} as
the basis for radical modification; Sojka has taken him at his word,
and it was pleasing to hear that Knuth had approved of the work when
he visited Brno earlier in 1996.

The second presentation was from Sergei Lesenko, who is the original
author of the partial Type~1 font downloading code that appears in the
latest alpha-test \textsf{dvips}.  Lesenko is developing a
\textsf{dvi2pdf}, based on the code of \textsf{dvips}.  As I
explained above, this isn't \emph{really} the `right' way to do the job
(any more than the established
\TeX\dash\textsf{dvips}\dash\textsf{repere}\dash\textsf{Distiller}),
but one can imagine it `catching on' more quickly than
\TeXtoPDF, simply because of the world's entirely justifiable
reliance on the stability of \TeX{} itself.

Neither of these projects is complete, and neither could be accepted
with their present specifications even if complete:
\begin{itemize}
\itemsep=0.25\itemsep
\item the precise nature of Sojka and Thanh's new primitives wasn't
  clear, but what \emph{was} clear didn't please many, and
\item Lesenko's \cmd\special\ commands  don't conform to the
  Hyper\TeX{} conventions, nor does their syntax look like that
  defined by the \acro{TWG} on device driver standards.
\end{itemize}
Nevertheless, I take heart from the fact that substantial new projects
continue to spring up in our cosy little \TeX\ world!

In the afternoon we had a trip to a neighbouring town called
Kimri, to visit the town museum.
The bus again collected us from the institute, but by the time we
arrived at the gate, the rain was beginning to be serious, and we had
to get out and file through the gate-house so that the bus could be
`checked' (an operation that, naturally, took rather little
time\nobreak\dots\unskip\@).
The road took us out of Dubna \emph{under} the Moscow-Volga
canal, past an enormous statue of Lenin and then along the top of the
dam that makes the ``man-made (Moscow) sea'' which (as I understand
it) is on the Volga.  By the time we arrived at Kimri, getting from
bus to museum was an occasion to sprint through huge puddles.

%The museum itself is intriguing (to me at least).  It starts with an
%account of the earliest finds from the region, of ice-age fauna, with
%Mammoth jaw bones, stuffed beaver and the like, stone tools, etc.  Then we
%have a series of vignettes of local life, the earlier ones developed
%from archaeological finds, the later ones from historical sources.  At
%some stage, Kimri became a big centre of the shoe trade, and was the
%site of a huge fair to which merchants came from all over Russia.
%These vignettes cover a bewildering array of dates up to c19., when
%they slow down for the ``patriotic war of 1812'' (against Napoleon's
%armies) before galloping on to the lead-up to 1917 and the civil war.
%Then vignettes of domestic life in the 20s and 30s before a
%heart-rending account of the town's experience of the ``great
%patriotic war against fascism'', during which the town was bombed but
%not occupied (the town's population at the time was 30\,000; there
%were 12\,000 casualties).

%The final cultural display was of Tupolev, who was a local man (which
%explains the model of the ill-fated Tu-144 in the foyer), and then
%there was a room of wild-life.  (I seemed to recognise more of the birds
%than did the locals\dots)

On the way back to the institute for dinner, the weather is more
terrible still.  The bus driver agreed to wait (for no longer than
20~minutes) while we ate our meal, which meant that we got a lot less
wet than we might otherwise expect.  The guards weren't playing: we
had to get out and show our passes and passports, filing through the
pouring rain, on the way in, and again on the way out.  The brilliant
arrangement this time was to spend significant time `checking' the
bus, so that the guard house became packed and the (real) workers at
the institute couldn't go home from work on their
bicycles.

So to the hotel, and to Irina Makhovaya's birthday party in her hotel room.
Wow!\Dash food, drink, toasts, all flowing freely until (after three
hours) tea arrived with the inevitable Samovar.  Lots of tea and then
dancing, until (at midnight) someone said we shouldn't have music in
the hotel after 11\,p.m.  So out to dance in the open air to the sound
of the tape player in Professor Pankratiev's car.  Until about
1.30\,a.m., when the
military police arrived: they wanted to impound the car and arrest the
Professor.  A slight dampener on the enthusiasm for dancing (Richard
Kinch disappeared into the undergrowth), but the Russian women present
pled with the police (in relays).  Eventually the word came that we
are to move the car about 5\,metres back so that it's \emph{this} side
of the `No entry' sign\dots\ and a little while later, Pankratiev was
no longer in jeopardy.  Eventually the police go away (and Richard
reappears!).   When I left (after 2\,a.m.), the dancing was still in
full swing; I've demonstrated to myself that even free-flowing Vodka
doesn't make me a competent dancer!

\section*{The last day}

The conference itself was scheduled to finish on Thursday
1\textsuperscript{st}; the morning session was to be papers (as
normal), then a closing ceremony.

Andrei Slepukhin swapped places with Kees van der Laan, so that Yannis
Haralambous (who was leaving early) could hear Slepukhin's ideas on
multilingual processing.  Slepukhin may have a point, but if he does,
he seems me to miss it himself; on the whole, I need to read a paper
(there wasn't one, even in the pre-prints).  Michel Goossens re-did
(and still further extended) his talk about
\LaTeX{}\ensuremath{\leftrightarrow}\acro{HTML}.

Then after coffee Kees van der Laan (again) talked about his \acro{BLU}e's
format; Kees is a polished presenter, but I remain unconvinced.  More
unconvincing still was Astrelin, who was (as far as one could tell)
talking about a \acro{C}++ class library implementing a few rather
trivial graphics functions together with some serious unresolved
research issues.  Until Pankratiev\footnote{Whose talk came as a
  surprise, as it too hadn't made it to my copy of the programme}
spoke a little later, there was no context whatever for Astrelin's
work; Pankratiev's project is putting together a standard harness for
the use of \TeX{} throughout Russia, and Astrelin's work is a small
part of it.  Between Astrelin and Pankratiev, though, was another
piece of solid down-to-earth stuff from Berdnikov's group\Dash not
exactly earth-shattering, but plainly addressing real needs of their
user community.  I was  impressed by all  three papers that came
out of Berdnikov's group.

Then we had our closing ceremony.  We had asked for nominations for
the Cathy Booth prize, on the basis of ``what would affect your work
most in the next year''.  I was sure that either Sojka
or Lesenko should get the prize; in the event Lesenko's showing was
poor, while Sojka was the clear winner.  However,
since Sojka had a prize last year, and since the prizes we had on
offer were rather 
infra-dig for him anyway (for example, as president of \acro{CS}-\tug, he
gets that group's complimentary copy of \BV), he accepted the prize on
behalf of his student Han The Thanh.  The top prize awarded by
\tug\ was to Berdnikov as representative of his group.  Well-deserved,
as I said; solid down-to-earth work.  \CyrTUG\ gave Michel Goossens a
big book (presumably about Russia\Dash all I could see was that it was
in Russian).

Then after another rather rapid lunch we went off to the bank of the
Volga, just up the path from the hotel, to catch the boat for our
picnic trip.  Beautiful weather, the sort of boat that plies many a
Western river with a lot more passengers, so one could walk around and
talk without inconveniencing one's fellows, and a leisurely trip up
the Volga to somewhere that wasn't identified (to me, at least), where
we turned around and sailed back down again.  It's hard to give a
clear picture of this trip.  I took a lot of photographs of the
assembled \TeX{}ies; Olga Grineva (of Berdnikov's group) went round
and collected signatures from every participant on the back of her
copy of the group photograph of the conference.

Two things, off our boat, stick in the mind.  The first is the perfectly
ordinary idyll of a camp-site in amongst the trees on the banks of the
river; people enjoying a holiday, with a canoe and a perfect beach to
swim from.  The second is the totally incomprehensible old man who was
wandering around a vast barge as it chugged along in the opposite
direction to us, stopping from time to time at one or
the other of the piles of sand on the barge and tipping a shovelful of
the sand into the river.

And eventually we had come back to the confluence of the Dubna river
with the Volga, where we turned up the Dubna for a short way to a
picnic site at Ratmino.  A fantastic spread was set out for us\Dash
food a-plenty and masses of booze.  We all tuck in, and then realise
that they've got huge barbecues running, and we're being offered
shashliki\Dash huge metal skewers with giant lumps of lamb on them.
Of \emph{course} there was a speech or two, and as a result there were
toasts.  We only had plastic mugs to toast with, and they don't
`chink'\dots  A small group struck up folk singing, others just talked
and enjoyed the early evening.

%Back on the boat, I realised I hadn't taken my lunch-time
%anti-inflammatory~\dots\ and now it was 2030!  \emph{That's} why I was
%aching so much\Dash I could hardly bring myself to dance (although I
%presented an almost-synchronised stumble towards the end of the
%evening, just before we reached the pier back in Dubna).  So I retired
%to my room to write up my diary, and watched as a thunderstorm broke
%to finish off a day of otherwise perfect weather.

\section*{Moscow, and the end of the party}

Friday was a trip to Moscow which combined a tour with dropping people
off for their travel home.  The bus turned off into Sheremetevo (2:
the international airport), and we said good bye to the first bunch.
Then we went into the centre of the city and met a guide, strikingly
dressed to look like a cross between a cartoon bee and a
Latin-American slinky dancer.  We went to Red Square, and observed the
outside of Lenin's mausoleum, of St.\ Basil's (extraordinary)
Cathedral and, of course, the Kremlin.  Then back to the bus and a
long drive around the city, where we were for ever seeing `panoramas'
of this, that or the other.  There were striking things in all this,
like the cathedral being rebuilt in the shell of the swimming pool
that replaced the original cathedral on the site, and like the
beautiful old houses that have survived since the rebuilding of the
city after Napoleon's devastation in 1812.

After a stop at a touristy-shop, we climbed the Lenin Hills (the
promontory on which Moscow University stands), dropped a few people
off, and then stopped  for what I would call a
\emph{real} panorama of the city.  The ski-jumps up here are (strangely) on
the itinerary of newly-weds, who climb the rickety iron steps in their
finery to look out over city from a better vantage point still.  Then
on to the war memorial that was dedicated in 1995 in remembrance of
the of the 1941--45 war.  This is a most astounding piece of
architecture, achieving a dignity that one doesn't, somehow, expect.
The arrays of fountains were spectacular; the singing in the memorial
church was wonderful, the sculpture was striking.  I loved it.

But at the end of that little tour, the party started breaking up in
earnest, and within the hour there was almost no-one left on the bus.

\end{Article}
