Report from CyrTUG '94 in Dubna (fwd)

[Petr Sojka]

This is Michel Goossens' <goossens at hpkuiipc.cern.ch> (a new address for
Michel) report from the 1994 CyrTUG meetings in Dubna.  It is available on
the CTAN in usergrps/info/cyrtug94.* (.txt this ASCII text file; .tex its
LaTeX2e source file).

Thanks to Michel for taking his time to give a review of the activities to
those of us unable to attend!

Regards,   George
===========================================================================
              CyrTUG94 in Dubna, September 7--11

                  Some personal impressions

                  =========================

    Michel Goossens, CERN, CH-1211 Geneva 23 , Switzerland



It was raining when our Swissair plain touched down after a flight
which took us in just over three hours from Geneva to Moscow. It
was almost five years since I was last in the Capital of Russia,
and indeed a lot seemed to have changed during that period. Prices
have gone up between one and ten thousand times (e.g. a metro or
bus ticket which used to be a few kopecks, now costs over one
hundred Rubles), with inflation still running at between five and
ten percent per month. Many streets and squares in central Moscow
have recovered their 19th century names and also the metro
stations that were named after one or another of the heroes of the
Revolution now have received a more neutral sounding name.


It was CyrTUG's Executive Director, Irina Makhovaya, who met me at
Sheremetievo airport, and took me to her apartment at the
beginning of Kutuzovskiy Prospekt, close to the Kievskaya metro
station, and the huge Stalin-style Ukraina Hotel. From the balcony
of the comfortable three room apartment situated on the nineth
floor one also has a nice view of the famous ``White House'' about
one kilometer away. I had the pleasure to stay with Irina and her
daughter Olga for the first two days.


On Monday September 5th, the day following my arrival, we went to
Mir Publishers, the place where Irina is working, and which also
houses the CyrTUG office. Irina has an email connection on a PC
via a modem, and they keep part of the CyrTUG electronic archives
on a hard disk connected to one of the Mir PC's, that are used to
enter text. At Mir they use Ventura for simple texts and TeX for
more complicated copy with formulae. Due to the economic crisis,
and the relatively low wages the production of scientific books,
in which Mir Publishers specializes, has drastically decreased,
and the production of titles has dropped by more than an order of
magnitude, the staff having been cut by over three quarters. This
is not only due to the fact that people have not a lot of money to
buy scientific books, but also because of the high inflation, the
high cost of paper and the collapse of the distribution system.
Therefore most books are produced, printed and sold locally in the
big centers of the country.


CyrTUG has about 300 members, with 37 institutional members.
Knowing that the average monthly wage of a scientific collaborator
is about the equivalent of $ 50 (when I was there one had 2230
Rubles for one $ ), it is evident that the membership rates cannot
be very high (about 6000 Rubles/year for an individual member,
half that for a student). The whole afternoon of the Monday Irina,
and her collaborators spent making the last preparations for the
CyrTUG94 Conference, that was starting on the following Wednesday,
and which was the main reason for my visit to Russia. Since
electronic communications are mostly very poor and expensive in
Russia, the main means of transferring files is via PC diskettes,
and therefore the whole CyrTUG archive was copied from the
reference PC to a streamer tape, that could just contain the sixty
Mbytes that made up the most important part of the Vinogradov
archive (M. Vinogradov---CyrTUG archivist). The streamer tape,
plus all the necessary cables, several boxes of 3.5 and 5.25 inch
diskettes, books, and other material was distributed over many
bags, that we would have to carry with us to Dubna, where the
Conference was taking place.


So, the next morning, we had to get up at six in the morning, to
meet the other CyrTUG and Mir organisers of the conference Marina
Kuznetsova, Olga Lapko, Irina Tereshkina, and Sergei Strelkov at
Savelovski Railway Station to take the 7:40 direct train to Dubna,
where we arrived about 10 o'clock. We were met by a member of the
local Organizing Committee, Y. Stolarskiy, in a mini-bus, that
also contained three PC's, that would allow the participants of
the conference to exchange files. While everybody drove off to
Ratmino, the location of the Conference hotel, situated at a very
pittoresque site where the Dubna river flows into the Volga. I
went with V.Korenkov, the deputy director of Dubna's Computing and
Automatization Division for a visit of the various departments of
this division, that I already visited a few times before. The town
of Dubna, which lies about 120 km north of Moscow, houses JINR,
the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research, which is a research
center of eighteen countries, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus,
Bulgaria, Cuba, the Czech Republic, Georgia, Kazakhstan, the
D.P.Republic of Korea, Moldova, Mongolia, Poland, Romania, Russia,
the Slovak Republic, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Vietnam, and with
Germany having an observer status. It is somewhat the East
European and Central Asean equivalent to the European Center for
Particle Physics (CERN) in Geneva, and many links have been
established between JINR and CERN over the years. The Institute
now has two 64 Kbit satellite links to the Internet (soon to be
upgraded to twice 128 kbit), they have a local area network of
more than 1000 machines (mostly PC's but now also an ever
increasing number of Sun workstations, and some other Unix
machines with a few remaining VMS and IBM mainframes). They have
all the main archives (for X-window, gnu, CTAN, PC,...) local on
their machines and during the week it was decided that Dubna would
serve as the CyrTUG local CTAN node. They have several WWW servers
up and running, and have produced a WWW hypertext structure
describing the Institute, that can be accessed with the URL
http://www.jinr.dubna.su/. It was also an occasion to meet once
more many of my Russian colleagues, with whom I worked before in
Russia or in Geneva.


After rejoining the CyrTUG group in Ratmino, about four km away to
the NE of the Institute, we spent the better part of the afternoon
setting up the PC's for the next day, copying the archive to the
hard disks, connecting the modem, preparing the badges, ...  .


The bulk of the participants to the CyrTUG 94 Conference arrived
at about 11 o'clock at Ratmino on Wednesday September 7th, after
taking the same train as we the previous day. There were about
sixty Russians who came from Ekaterinburg, Kazan, Moscow,
Novosibirsk, Nizhniy Novgorod, Sankt Petersburg, Yaroslavl', and
of course Dubna itself, and three non-Russians, namely Kees van
der Laan, the founding President and now Honorary member of NTG
(and also a member of CyrTUG), John Linn Roseman, an American
working for a software company in Sankt Peterburg, and myself.


At 12 o'clock I.Makhovaya formally opened the Conference, Vladimir
Korenkov, the chairman of the organizing Committee spoke a few
words of welcome, followed by Youry Stolarsky of Dubna, who
explained the local arrangements. Then the Scientific secretary of
the Institute explained the importance of TeX for the scientists
in Dubna as a means of communicating their results to the outside
world. After that I walked onto the stage and before giving a one
hour summary of the presentations made at the TUG94 Conference in
Santa Barbara in the Summer, I spoke a few words on behalf of TUG,
congratulating CyrTUG with the organisation of their conference,
and informing those present that I not only had come to Russia to
give presentations, but also that I was there to listen to them,
and to find out how TUG, as the international TeX users group, can
contribute to help them solve their problems in the area of
support to all those using the Cyrillic alphabet with TeX. During
the following days I had various occasions to discuss these
matters with the participants, so that I could form myself a
better picture of the situation.


In the afternoon the different speakers presented their experience
with introducing and developing TeX tools in their respective
institutes, and the particular problems encountered when using
Russian and the Cyrillic alphabet. A particularly interesting
exchange of opinion took place when the representative of the
publication department of JINR came to tell us why they think that
TeX is so difficult to use for marking up documents, especially
for non-technical staff that have to enter the text into the
computer. When moving from a dedicated typesetting system, to PC's
for data entering, the Publication Department decided to adopt
Ventura, especially to make the transition from the former
dedicated system to the computer less painful for the staff,
mainly because it allows for WYSIWYG data entry. Now, however, the
scientific collaborators of the Institute want them to make the
transition to LaTeX to ease the communication with the rest of the
world and also because mathematical formulae look a lot better
with TeX. During the discussion that followed it was emphasized
several times that TeX syntax is unituitive for the non-scientist,
and that the learning curve is very steep. Nevertheless, the
decision had been taken to enter the technical articles with LaTeX
and during the time of the conference a LaTeX course for beginners
was offered to the members of the Publishing Department (and to
all those who were interested), and was followed by about twenty
people.


Since I arrived in Russia, the weather had become sunny, and even
warm, so that after dinner, all participants went for a walk to
the very point where the Dubna river throws itself into the Volga,
and on the way back we passed by a nice little church in typical
Russian style, that was being renovated. After the walk we met in
one of the rooms of the participants and had one of those ``Slav''
evenings, with Vodka, sausage, bread, cheese, onion, cucumber,
followed by tea and biscuits. These are the occasions where one
really gets to know each other and can appreciate the meaning of
words like hospitality, friendship, and mutual understanding.


The next morning Sergey Strelkov and I accompanied the
participants to the introductory LaTeX course to the Institute,
where I had a meeting with the local WWW guru to discuss common
developments, while Sergey wanted to use the occasion to get hold
of 100 Mbytes of files by copying what he needed onto the streamer
tapes he brought with him from Moscow. After we got back to the
conference site we could still enjoy presentations about how to
design Cyrillic fonts, the use of PostScript and vector fonts,
WYSIWYG approaches, and a discussion of the use of TeX at Moscow
State University, where there is now a very active group led by
Evgeniy Pankratiev. After lunch I participated in a round table
discussion on the various coding-schemes presently in use for the
Cyrillic alphabet. Already in May of this year a similar meeting
in Moscow did not succeed in adopting a common coding scheme for
all languages that are using the Cyrillic alphabet (apart from
Russian that are Bielorussian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Serb,
Moldavian, and many of the languages of the CIS). There are at
least three main coding schemes, namely KOI8, Alternativiy, ISO
8859-7, plus code page CP866, which all differ in their layout. A
supplementary problem is where the non-Russian Cyrillic characters
are to be placed. With the advent of Unix, and X-window X11R6,
which seems to favor ISO, but taking into account the fact that
most users are on PC's that are not even connected to the network,
it will not be trivial to come up with a solution, which might not
even be so important anyway, since, when one wants to communicate,
one can always transform the encoding into one that is generally
adopted. And here Unicode (and the Omega TeX extension of
Y.Haralambous and J.Plaice) is without doubt the (long term)
answer. It was decided to form a three member working group to
come up with a proposal to define a ``CyrTUG standard encoding''.


The Friday we had a few more presentations about the use of
graphics, experience with using TeX in publishing houses for the
production of scientific journals, and issues of typography. The
afternoon was dedicated to a question and answer session, where
everybody could come with his problem(s) and get an answer, or
share experience with fellow TeX users.


At 19:00 the grand banquet started, and after the ritual series of
toasts to a better future, friendship, more TeX and less
approximate typography, ...  , we went all onto the dance floor and
on the tune of some typical and other less-typical modern Russian
tunes, transformed ourselves into TeX rockers till the music
stopped at 11 o'clock and we all dispersed into subgroups to
continue tour last evening together, or, too tired to do anything
useful, just went to bed.


The Saturday morning started with my LaTeX2e course that lasted to
approximately midday, when CyrTUG's business meeting started.
After the report of the Executive Director, and the Treasurer, the
activity report and the accounts were accepted. Then Evgeniy
Pankratiev (Moscow State University) was elected as new President
of CyrTUG, succeeding Joseph Romanovsky of Sankt Petersburg. With
the new President in the chairman's seat the meeting then adopted
the plan for 1994/95 and declared the 1994 Conference closed,
thanking the participants for their support.


Then we all took the train back to Moscow and during the trip we
decided that it would be extremely useful that CERN became an
institutional member of CyrTUG, because of the many exchanges
between Dubna and CERN scientists, and the fact that more and more
visitors to CERN want to be able to use the same environment as at
their home institute, and continue work on documents they started
in their home country. As Dubna is also an institutional member,
CERN will be able to contribute in the area of expertise and
communications. In agreement with the Dubna Institute is was also
decided to submit Dubna's candidature to the TUG Conference
Planning Committee to organize the 1996 TUG Conference.


It was misty when we got up on the Sunday morning around nine
o'clock, and the streets were almost empty since all Moskovites
who can afford it spend the weekend on their (or a friend's)
datcha in the countryside surrounding the city. So Irina, Olga and
I had our last breakfast together, Irina took a few pictures, as a
souvenir, we discussed what a success the conference had been, and
already started making plans for next year. Then we took
trolley-bus number two, that took us down Kutuzovskiy Prospekt, to
Noviy Arbat, past the White House, then along the Sadovaya, the
open air swimming pool, the banks of the Moskova, up in front of
the Kremlin to Teatralnaya Square (with the Bolshoy Theater), then
the metro and the bus to the airport, where I had to take leave of
Irina, who had been such a perfect hostess. During the flight back
to Geneva, which took almost forty minutes longer than the flight
to Moscow, due to 200 km/hour head winds, I paused to look back at
the interesting and rich experience I had gained during my six-day
stay in Russia. I have visited Russia many times before, but
things seem different now, there is hope, people talk freely, they
all feel they are moving towards a better future, also
financially, yet I think they still have a long way to go. And it
is precisely here that we can help our colleagues and friends, by
developing tools that are freely available, and distributing our
publications and magazines to them. The main problem in Russia is
communication, getting the information and material to different
places, so by sending them one or more copies of our publications
(or making them electronically available, so that they can be
distributed on diskettes if there are no reliable networks) we can
contribute to the distribution of TeX in Russia, and the other
States of the CIS.