Hi

Tomorrow's TeX hour is on a successful human interface to DocBook XML, as used in practice.

Recently I revisited Alpine Linux (small, simple, secure and good in containers) and discovered that it has new documentation pages. I liked the pages and so wondered how they were created. They use AsciiDoc (new to me) which is a human-readable document format, semantically equivalent to DocBook (a long established XML markup language for technical documentation).

This greatly interests me. There are many tools that can process DocBook XML, which underlies the math accessibility project PreTeXt (which can generate braille output). And AsciiDoc is being used by Alpine Linux who, in my opinion, have very good taste in their choice and adoption of technology. What I've learnt will be the subject of tomorrow's TeX Hour.

TeX Hour: Thursday 16 June, 6:30 to 7:30pm UK time.
Zoom URL: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/78551255396?pwd=cHdJN0pTTXRlRCtSd1lCTHpuWmNIUT09
UK Time Now: https://time.is/UK.

URLS:
https://www.alpinelinux.org
https://docs.alpinelinux.org
https://antora.org
https://asciidoc.org
https://asciidoctor.org
https://asciidoc-wg.eclipse.org
https://pretextbook.org

Last week's TeX Hour was Learning Platforms - books to containers, Euclid to Katacoda.
Video is available at https://youtu.be/n_Ew8Gol0TE.

Next week's TeX Hour (Thus 23 June) will be on PDF and typeset output in the web browser. I used to collect stamps and I will start as a case study with two high level stamp auction sites.

https://siegelauctions.com/
https://siegelauctions.com/2022/1259/1259.pdf # Warning - large.

https://en.calameo.com/books/0043275393edf39430f7f
https://en.calameo.com/read/0043275393edf39430f7f

By the way, for security and other reasons from 1840 until about 1950 postage stamps were miniature masterpieces of design and printing (in other words graphic typography), as on a larger scale were banknotes. Both are part of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_printing. New security measures include polymer printing and holograms. And bar-code readers in postal systems allow users to print their own pre-paid postage labels, a substitute for the postage stamp.

By the way, the Universal Postal Union, founded 1874 by the Treaty of Bern, is the world's third oldest international organisation, and now part of the United Nations.

wishing you well

Jonathan