114

TUGboat, Volume 42 (2021), No. 2

Interview with Frank MittelbachPaulo Ney de Souzain the same direction in terms of further research intypography and computer typesetting.
PN: Wow!

This interview took place on 7 August 2021, during
the TUG 2021 online conference. Frank Mittelbach
has been leading the LATEX Project since August
1989, i.e., for exactly 25 years at the time of theinterview.

PN: My next question is related exactly to what
you what you’re talking about, I think, the first time
I ever saw you talking, it was a talk in San Francisco
at the end of the 80s, where you were complaining
about LATEX. I don’t know exactly. . .
FMi: Is that the Stanford meeting, the one where. . .
PN: Yeah, the San Francisco Bay area, most likely

Stanford.
FMi: At the end of the 80s, it must have been, I

guess, the one where Don decided that TEX 3 comesout?
PN: Yeah well, I mean, I walked into the talk under

Steve Grathwohl: Welcome to the interview section of the program. Today we have Paulo Ney deSouza who’s going to be interviewing Frank Mittelbach so take it away Paulo.
Paulo Ney de Souza (PN): Thank you, Steve.
Good morning, Frank, good afternoon or good night,
in fact.
Frank Mittelbach (FMi): It’s about seven o’clockin the evening, so you can say anything.
PN: Nice to see you, man. How are you doing thesedays?
FMi: I’m doing well; can’t complain. With therestrictions we all go through in the last one and ahalf year or more, but otherwise I’m doing fine.
PN: Are you completely done with HP? Are you

completely devolved from that project now?
FMi: I decided in 2015. . . I stopped working as
an architect at HP and resigned. And since thenI’m only doing freelance work and largely devoting
myself to research and LATEX, yes.
PN: Well, start by telling me how does your day

look like. How much time do you put in the LATEX
project, how much on other stuff?
FMi: Well, at the moment, not counting trying to fi-

nally finish the third edition of the LATEX Companion,
which is sort of a side project, I spend right now thewhole time on LATEX and the tagging project, which
is huge, and, well, after that I have other plans going
Paulo Ney de Souza
doi.org/10.47397/tb/42-2/tb131mittelbach-desouza

the belief that LATEX was the most wonderful thing in
the world and I, and I go there and I see this lunaticcomplaining about LATEX. I said what the heck is
this, and it was, it took me years to process yourtalk, it took me literally years to understand, fully
understand what was wrong with LATEX, and you
know now in retrospect, if I could see how correct
you were, and I think that the drawback of that talkis that you inherited the LATEX development, so you
guys complaining, that’s good.
FMi: That’s more or less in fact what was happening,and I mean I was young, and so bold, and not seeing
the consequences of all this, but, but basically I
started working with TEX in the mid-80s or so, anddiscovered later a draft manual [of LATEX]. It was
before the book came out and I thought this was
great ideas, and then I was trying to actually usethat on the computers in the university and it diedon me, because the computers didn’t have enoughmemory to process LATEX at that time. So I had to
implement my own format based on the ideas that
Leslie put forward in his manual. And that gave mea huge sort of insight into all these inner workings,
because I had to make it even smaller than it wasback then, as far as LATEX is concerned. So withthis starting point I and Rainer Schoepf, we sent anenormous number of bug reports to Leslie when we
finally managed to get LATEX going on the university
Multics system. And then I got a chance to go to
Stanford.
Well, and then I gave this talk “What’s wrong
with all this?” I mean — we came from Europe.
Basically, I came as sort of telling people why LATEX
is not a good thing. And also from Europe, wecame in this year to tell Don Knuth that he reallyshould take care of his cultural background, coming

TUGboat, Volume 42 (2021), No. 2
basically, his grandparents and so, from Scandinavia
and Germany, to actually take a little bit [of] careabout something like diacritics, and so better thana 7-bit system could do. That was a big thing in
the Stanford meeting, that we actually managed toconvince Don to produce TEX 3, when he basically
finally, sort of agreed that there is something thatneeds doing. The other thing that happened wasthat I personally then met Leslie and we had a longsession there during the meeting and afterwards, andthen he basically dropped the whole thing on me andRainer and Chris, and that was the start of it . . . so
it was ’89.
PN: So it was more a handover from him and fromLeslie directly to you, so the community was notreally involved, or was there much more that. . .
FMi: Before that time the whole development andmaintenance of LATEX, there was no development
happening any more, but the maintenance, if there
were bugs or so, you could send them to Leslie andLeslie would potentially do something or not about
it. It was all done by him at that time, and hewanted to move on, and so he, I think he was in theend, he was quite glad about having somebody whosays, things are wrong, but not just pushing themto him, but actually being prepared to take it on.
So we then jointly with Leslie, that was the idea,
and this is what we actually did. We jointly devised
LATEX 2ε : a certain set of extensions after, beside thestuff that I said needs fixing, like getting better fontsupport, getting a lot of things done that was not in
LATEX 2.09, but we also jointly worked on specifying
the abstraction for the color support; Joseph spoke
about that earlier. This was implemented by David,
but it was a joint effort between David, Leslie, Chrisand myself to work on those specs that then becamegraphics and color packages as the new standard,
and this is part of what then ended up in Leslie’sbook. So his last involvement with LATEX was doingthat second edition of the book and going jointly
together to release, if you like, the 2ε -version. But
the actual coding for 2ε , everything which was quite
a substantial change from 2.09 to 2ε , he was not
involved in that. He was only sort of a consultant atthat time and after this he completely dropped out.
He sometimes in the years after sent me a bug reportbecause something in his research paper didn’t work;
he expected it to be or something like that and yeah,so this is the way it worked. In some sense I think
this is a great way for him to do it, because a lot of
people can’t let that baby “grow up”, and just needto stick to it without then actually sort of keeping
up with it in some sense.

115
But he did that, I mean he gave the whole
responsibility and everything over to us, and did notinterfere with it afterwards, which is great, becausethat allowed us actually to do a lot of things which
otherwise would have been basically not possible andprobably LATEX wouldn’t be here anymore.
PN: Well, so, so let me ask you something else. I

now have a better perspective of this whole thing andI kind of see things fall into place. You know color,
with a talk by Joseph just a few minutes ago, and inthings like accessibility and things like PDF reflow
and so forth. So things are falling into place rightnow very nicely. Do you still have any complaints
about LATEX?
FMi: Oh, I have a lot of complaints! But yes andno, you’re perfectly right in saying that things are
currently starting off falling into place, and this isquite interesting because in some sense in the early90s, so between the TUG conference, e.g., after thetime we took over from Leslie and [then], we werethinking of producing LATEX 3.
I mean LATEX 2ε was never meant to be, in somesense. The idea was, I mean, I went to Stanfordand said this is all wrong, and this is wrong, andmathematics doesn’t work, and they should be put
into LATEX, and not as a completely separate format,1 which it was back then, and all these kind ofthings. So we had these ideas that you could produce
a much better LATEX, and we actually produced amuch better LATEX during the years 1991–92, andwe actually had a new version of LATEX that could
compile its own manual.2 The only problem was, thewhole interview we’re now doing wouldn’t have beenenough to get the manual compiled, which was only
about 100 pages.
[[connection unstable for a few seconds]]
PN: You dropped. . .
FMi: [We had] a lot of [ideas and we implemented

them]
FMi: but they were too early. There are about two

decades [too early] . . . (My Internet connection isunstable, can you hear me?)PN: (Yeah, I can. It froze for a second and then it

came back.)
1 Explanatory note by Frank: What is now the package
amsmath was at that time a separate format called ams-latex,
because it required NFSS (the New Font Selection Scheme),
and that was not part of LATEX either back then.
2 Explanatory note by Frank: The famous L
ATEX3 thatwas never made public back then. It only saw the light in
2020, where most of it was added to the LATEX format as the
LATEX3 programming layer.

Interview with Frank Mittelbach

116
FMi: (Yeah okay, this isn’t, this is not as old as the

stuff we’re talking about, but that’s an old computer[here] right now.) Anyway, so we had all these ideas
and we had to abandon them. I mean, there were lotsof them, I mean basically what is nowadays known as
cascading style sheets, we had that for LATEX before
it existed for HTML. But we gave it up, because
it was just not workable in the context of this, so
there was all these kinds of ideas were around andsometimes implemented.
But now, after, well, what is it 20, 20–30 years
now, the problems that we tried to solve back thenand only very partially solved was 2ε — they are stillwith us, and what is now falling into place is, inmy view, that a lot of these ideas are still extremely
current. And so, by now, with computers being
vastly more powerful, that you can do on your iPhone
things that I couldn’t have done with the computers
I had back then. They are now sort of coming tofruit; I mean they blossomed over the years and, I
think last year, I said [the ideas from LATEX3 finallyarrived after 30 years, without people noticing it,in]3 the layer underneath, inside the kernel, and we
can actually start making use of it. Last year webuilt the hook management into LATEX, which is now
nicely being used in various packages already andit’s used by us. A lot of the ideas from back then can
now be actually implemented and used, and as partof the tagging project, a lot of those harmonizations
and improvements will happen, because we will needthat as part of making LATEX accessible and what
Jonathan Godfrey said, and rightly complained, isthat LATEX didn’t change from 25 years ago to now
in terms of what it could do in the sense of making
accessible documents. That was just not possible in
the past, and now it becomes possible and is possible.
So, I have still a lot of complaints, but many of themwill be addressed in the next few years, and this is
now a good thing.
PN: It’s really nice to see this information, I mean

this. I hear complaints about people, you know about
waiting for LATEX 3, but I came to realize that, that
I just need to be patient, because the changes thatwere required were enormous, and you can’t stop a
train that is moving and change the wheels whileit’s running. And so I came to appreciate over theyears and I guess we’ll just have to wait a little bit
more and start, and I’m starting to use some of thesepackages which are coming out of the LATEX 3 project
and they all seem pretty nice and pretty round.
FMi: Yeah, I mean this is certainly something you

have to take into consideration. LATEX has a huge
3 Again a connection drop :-(Paulo Ney de SouzaTUGboat, Volume 42 (2021), No. 2
user base and, in fact, in the last years I think one
can see that it is actually growing because there isquite a need for structured documentation nowadays
and LATEX is pretty much well placed to produce that.
And if we are now getting to the point that we canactually produce structured output as well, not justnice looking documents that have great mathematics
inside or something, and have all the cross references
properly resolved, in contrast to some other systems,
but now actually being able to have in some sense
reusable documents, accessible documents, and so I
think it has a very good place in the world and thefuture as well. My impression is that the user baseis growing rather than lessening in the last years.
PN: Alright.

So let me ask you a question which is, I guess
it’s a matter of opinion as well. I mean programs
like InDesign and Word are sort of fast implementing
TEX goodies. You know InDesign and Word has had
a plugin for math formulas for a number of years
now, where you can enter mathematical formulas
using LATEX notation, and previously they would use
their own algorithms to decide how the formula look
like. And I get in over the last eight years or so,both of them have abandoned their own processingof the formulas and they have left it to TEX, andso we use this literally TEX algorithms to do thepositioning, and InDesign right now is implementing
microtypography and paragraph breaks very much
TEX-like I mean the algorithms are out there, Knuth–
Plass and so forth, are public, and so they’re bringing
it in so you have this instance of where you havemicrocosms of TEX within an interactive environment
outside. Do you see a chance that we’ll ever see aninteractive LATEX in the future?
FMi: A qualified “no”, I would say. I mean wehave to be careful of what we’re talking about here.
Something like the paragraph breaking or how todisplay a formula in terms of spatial relationships
and so, these are algorithms which are very sort oflocalized.
PN: Localized, uh-huh.
FMi: I mean that’s fine, and in some sense it wasalways surprising that even though something likethe paragraph breaking algorithm was out and public, nobody else, like Word or so, took it up, andLeslie told me the story that. . . I mean Leslie is
employed by Microsoft these days as a researcher.
He’s not working for Microsoft, he’s doing research
paid for by Microsoft, if you like. But anyway, he
was talking to the Word development and said, well
why don’t you do this? And see, here’s the algorithm.

TUGboat, Volume 42 (2021), No. 2
Why is Word producing this horrible output? And
that department, the development people, they told
him there’s no market, we are not putting a complicated algorithm that produces problems for us tosort of maintain and everything into the product if
the appreciation from the market is not there.
So the Word market was targeted at something,at least in their thoughts, where an improved typographic quality would not actually be an improvement. Now for something like InDesign that is different, and to my understanding, InDesign was using
the TEX algorithm for line breaking already for sometime.4
PN: Yes.
FMi: I don’t know about the math formulas, but

my understanding was they were using it for theparagraph breaking. But coming back. If you have adesigner tool like InDesign, where you work page by
page, and the focus is on getting, per page, the pages
right, you certainly want to have very good quality
in terms of line breaking and getting sort of a shotat that automatically in the best possible manner.
But the focus was, working with InDesign is moreindividualization of pages, not focus of a structured
document where LATEX has this very big strength,
which is describing the content in a reusable, largely
reusable fashion, and that is quite independent of
the underlying engine.
I mean, if you think about the history, thenthese ideas that Leslie put into LATEX were actually
coming from a system called Scribe, to a large extent.
Leslie had a lot of new ideas as on top of it, and hemade it popular. The way to describe documents as astructure is actually not, was not done in the systemthat had TEX underneath. [Scribe] had its own
typesetting, which to my understanding was pretty
horrible because it was more typewriter-like output if
you like, if my understanding is correct, because theunderlying engine to actually produce the print was
not very good. But these are two different things,
and if you think about a huge document like. . . let’s
take the book that I’m trying to finish for a coupleof years now again: the LATEX Companion, whichhas 1600 pages.
PN: Mm hmm.
4 Editor’s note:

InDesign was the first program to
implement microtypography features (for ordinary text),
such as font expansion and character protrusion, in theearly 1990s, as part of the “HZ-engine”. Peter Karow’s
memoriam for Hermann Zapf discusses this in some detail:
Digital typography with Hermann Zapf, TUGboat 36:2,
tug.org/TUGboat/tb36-2/tb113zapf-karow.pdf.

117
FMi: So that is not going to be interactive because

there are dependencies from page one to page 1600,
like the correct index at the end, and all these kindof things. So what you can have, I think, we will see
maybe more is something like “instant TEX”, where
it appears to be more or less simultaneously updating.
I mean, you all remember the talk by David Fuchs ayear ago, I think, where he is working on a system
where you compile real time, and you have the ability
to get the pages you see very naturally, sort of being
shown immediately when you make changes. Now
that is sacrificing some of the power of what LATEX
does, and going beyond in this direction is certainly
something that I would not be surprised to see that
this is happening. This is still in essence a batch
system. I mean, it’s just the batch system that you,
you don’t really realize, because a lot of the batchprocessing goes in the background, on the stuff thatyou are currently not looking at, so it appears to you
as if it would be instant, but from the core idea I
would say batch orientation is part of the story, andtherefore it is a different kind of thing.
PN: Right right. Nice to have your perspective on

this. I try to look at this issue from the point ofview of global and local, and interactivity is just likea. . . This is probably a change that happens very
fast, and that you worried only about the local stuff,
but the separation between local and global in LATEX
seems to be hard.
FMi: First of all, it is right now hard in TEX, but

the moment you would have system variations of
the TEX engine that actually may make this kindof instant result. I mean, Textures was trying to dothat years ago which, again, I think it was before
it [the world] was ready for something like this, but
nowadays that could be a solution not too far in the
future, when that appears to be instant, and thensome system like LATEX could adapt to that, I wouldsay.
You get more like the feeling you are actuallyworking on an interactive system. Okay, you enterin one screen, but you don’t even have to. David
showed in his example that you could actually enterin the output format, and it would correctly translate
to the source, so he had a two-way, if I remember
correctly.
PN: I have to watch this talk. I haven’t seen it.
This is interesting to know.
FMi: No, it must be two years ago. It was an on-site

meeting, it was the one, the last one that I attended
in person, so it was two years ago. Last year was
already pandemic. Yeah.
Interview with Frank Mittelbach

118
PN: I’ll have to look for it.

Arthur Rosendahl: That was the meeting in Palo
Alto. Sorry, right, it was the meeting in Palo Alto.
You were there for a while, Paulo.
PN: No, I was there for, not for the whole thing,but I had to be out for like one day, and that may
be the day that he spoke.
FMi: Yeah, check it. It was a question that was

unrecorded. It’s a pity.
PN: Yeah. Now I’ll look for whatever he has written

up and so forth.
I wanted to ask you about something else. You
are also famous for a very big statement that you
have used TEX on every single platform you dealt
with, going back to VMS and Multics and Sun andSolaris and so forth.
FMi: Mainframes.
PN: And mainframes and. . . I would say evenmainframes. . .
FMi: No, mainframes were the most problematicalones actually, because mainframes are EBCDIC, they
are not ASCII, and TEX is very much ASCII, and they

don’t have a file system; well, not one to speak of.
PN: Since the mid-80s, when TEX made its way into
PC and Macintosh, we have had a decent version of

TEX on every single operating system there is. And
the last 15 years I’ve seen tectonic shifts in operating
system usage. Gartner right now says that 80% of
the shipment of OS in the world are Android, iOS,
and Chrome OS — Chromebooks. You know, noneof them run a decent version of TEX. None of themrun TEX Live, for example. Do you see implicationsof this for the future of TEX?
FMi: Again I would say no.

First of all, I think your statement is not quite
correct because on iOS, at least, you get a decent
enough TEX to work with, and that is not using
TEX Live, but similar, so you can install your own
packages on top of what is already provided and itcomes with. . . Well, at least the last time I used it,
it was already quite good.
PN: Quite good. It is the best one of the three.
FMi: Yeah, but the point of why I think it is a “no”

is. . . except for tablets. Tablets are a little bit sortof in between. I think this is apples and pears.
I use my phone for an enormous amount ofthings these days. But a huge Excel field with 20
columns, and try to enter data in it from my phone,or stuff like that, and I don’t think that a phone
Paulo Ney de SouzaTUGboat, Volume 42 (2021), No. 2
screen is in any way suitable to do programming. To
do LATEX documents, that is more than just plain
text. And I certainly think that on the tablet level
there is a gray area where you can these days, and it
will more and more become something like a laptop
for you, both in size, as well as in capabilities, butthen I would expect that something like, systems
like TEXwriter, which I think is the one that I was
talking about on iOS. Those and similar ones willshow up to enable you to do something like a decent
TEX system on such tablets as well. And on the
iPhone, they would work on the iPhone but you
wouldn’t want to work with them on the iPhone.
So the fact that you have 80% of all the sort ofcomputer operating systems being sold nowadays
being some of these handy5 devices is one thing,but for programming or for doing graphic design orphotograph handling, or what have you, I mean notfor shooting the photograph — the iPhone is getting
better and better and the other phones as well todo photographs — so Canon has a problem, and allthese people. But if you want to postprocess the
stuff you still like to have a decent screen size.
PN: Right.
FMi: . . . I would say. I don’t think that is going

away, because it has more to do with the physics, andso the same I would assume is the fact when you’re
producing an article and you want to do research inparallel, you want to have two/four windows open to
do things in parallel, and that means you’re talking,you have a computer. I mean, I like to have a small
laptop; most people say, how can you work on the
13-inch laptop?
It is problematic in some cases, which is why I
also have a big desktop computer, for stuff where alaptop doesn’t work. My argument is it’s the balance
between nice and light, and I can sit outside in thegarden with it. But I wouldn’t go down to a phone,so the 80% yes, that is the way the world goes, butthat doesn’t take away the 20% of the professionals
doing certain kind of jobs, and I think stuff where
TEX plays a role or LATEX plays a role will be in this
20%, and this is not going to change, Then it will go
into the online side. I mean something like Overleaf istaking more and more proportion of what processingof structured complex STEM documents, is going tohappen. But again, Overleaf on the iPhone or on
your Android is okay. As long as you can just dictate,
and your text is not more complicated than that,that may be a future, that you don’t have LATEX
or something. You just dictate your thing and the
5 Explanatory note by Frank: handy = “mobile device”,
a German/English false friend.

TUGboat, Volume 42 (2021), No. 2
artificial intelligence puts your tags in. And I don’tknow, maybe 10 years from now, who knows?
PN: What I meant more, the intermediate formats,119
current for that long period of time — we can’t really
say that the LATEX Companion 2 is still current, but
it’s still not completely useless, so. . .

more like the tablets, and so forth. For example, youknow the Chrome OS is running on very large laptops
right now and Microsoft has this line of computers,
their Surface laptops are tablets that work as full
Windows computers.

Jerzy Ludwichowski (JL): Yes, it’s still handy
in many cases, but yes, one has to resort to watch
online for packages because they update, and so on.

FMi: Yeah, but those are not the 80%. I think that’s

JL: Yeah.

the whole stuff, and now I agree with you. I mean
this proportion comes up, and this is a certain nicheor maybe it is becoming more than a niche, but thenit wouldn’t surprise me if the TEX community, or
one of the other Open Source projects that ports it
onto that more as a commercial one. I mean, some ofthose tools that we have seen on iOS in the last few
years were not for free; for ten bucks or something,which is fine. I mean some developers have to live,
sometimes, so we shouldn’t be too concerned about
that. But getting a decent system onto that if theother physical parts fit. So that there is a need. I
mean that’s the point; you have to have a need, if
you have a laptop or tablet which is big enough toactually do this kind of thing. And, yes, I would
think if enough of those show up, and we will see that
also at some point in time, as an engine, a supported
engine. My guess.

FMi: But this is going to change. I don’t want to

FMi: Potentially.

has a question for you.

make promises, see. The book is in its last stages, andlast stages, that still means it goes to professional
copy editing and it goes to professional indexing,
and I have to do the layout after the copy editing
because everybody knows that whenever you touch asystem like LATEX, TEX, changing a couple of words,
everything changes in the line breaks. So there’s still
a lot of work to do in parallel to all these projects
that I actually want to do. But the majority of
the work is done, which was hard enough. I went
through 5000 packages on CTAN, documentation by
documentation, made notes about what is good, what
is not, tried things out, checked what has changed
in various things. By the time I got around with
one chapter, then five chapters later this was nolonger current, so I had to do it again, because it was
just a huge, huge undertaking, but I think it getsaround. . . well, how should I say, it takes too muchtime sometimes, but. . .

PN: LATEX Companion 3 and LATEX 3, how are theyJL: It’s a moving target, isn’t it?

PN: Well, Jerzy wants to join the conversation. He

related?
FMi: First of all, I already said last year we try toabandon a bit the word “three” because that cameback from the days when we were young and werethinking we can do this in two or three years, andthen found out the problems are so hard and thecomputers so slow that we couldn’t do it. This kindof LATEX 3 that we had in mind back then is nevergoing to happen.
What is happening, as I announced that lastyear, is we will go and take the whole LATEX community on a journey with very many safety nets
to modernize LATEX rather than building a second
system which then nobody’s going to use because it
takes too long a time to be as a system on its own
usable. So there will be something like a modernization going on right now, and it will not take another30 years. We are now in a position where we canactually make these kind of things.
And the three in both cases is just because I
only have time about every 10 to 15 years to write abook. And it’s good that these books actually stayFMi: Yeah, yeah, sometimes it’s a moving target,
which is why it is good to get a book out, because
then. . .
JL: A reference point, yeah.
FMi: It’s a reference point, and people accept that.
When we talked about it and decided, Oh, you know
a lot of those things when the LATEX Companion 2
book came out where we’re improved because I tried
to explain them. When I couldn’t explain them I
talked to the author of the package and things sortof got sorted. But then the book was out, and so
the documentation said the package can do this, andthis, in this form, and these kind of things thenstayed, because they were a record through the book.
Because of doing the same, though, with the LATEXCompanion 3, but not putting the book out. . . I
mean I started it in 2018, I think, so it’s quite along time ago. I cannot really tell people not tochange their minds when I’m not being able to do
my promise after having sort of talked them into
doing something to improve that further.

Interview with Frank Mittelbach

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TUGboat, Volume 42 (2021), No. 2

So yes, it is a changing target, and which is also
why it’s good to finally come to a close, because thenit is no longer a changing target, it’s more like apoint of reference.
JL: I was, I asked this question because perhaps it’s

good to make an official statement that people don’t
confuse those trees.
FMi: Okay, well. . .
JL: I am waiting for, for the 1600 pages or so, toget my hands on, but I’m confident. I understandthat LATEX 3, in the sense like the language and thesystem, is evolving, and it cannot be frozen into thebook or the book frozen into it, but that doesn’t. . .

might restrict the audience like being vaccinated orsome such. Be on the safe side.
FMi: That’s the. . . Okay, this is, this is what in

my case, for myself, it’s sort of the biggest sort ofrestriction right now. I was fortunate enough thatI, because I decided to resign from, say, industry
work, and so I was not affected by the pandemic inthat sense. I did work from home already at HP
for 10 or 15 years because I was doing international
work so that would not have changed anyway, butwhat I really missed in the last years was the sort ofpersonal contact, by email and by phone or Zoom orsomething, and things like those conferences. I mean
I haven’t been on any since 1919,6 and then this.

FMi: Well, this is, this is definitely independent.
The work that we’re currently doing, I already documented the new hook system because that is ready.
It is part of the book.
Everything that has gone around in the tagging
world around good “getting accessible documents”,
that will have some major improvements and functionality coming along in the next years. This is
not going to be in the book. I’m not going to wait
for that. That’s not important. The focus of thebook. . .

JL: As Pawel Jackowski puts it, the ideas are being

JL: “Accessibility Companion”.

Okay. Thanks, Paulo, nice talking to you would
love to see you in person, but if you are speaking,you have to put your unmute button.

Yeah, that’s a,that’s a thing to be done.
FMi: That could be a small, small booklet. Thatis fine, but, but the point of the LATEX Companion
is to be a companion to your normal work, and thisis what all these packages or, let’s say, selection of
the packages, those that I thought is worth having
at your fingertips. For example, one of those fromevery sort of area. Like the last Companion, the aim
is to be in itself sufficient most of the time to do
whatever you want to do in terms of LATEX. This
is not so much about the inner workings and theimprovements of design, it’s more about all thesepackages that are out there.
JL: Thank you for the explanations.
PN: Thank you for this wonderful interview, Frank.

Does anybody else want to join the conversationor has any other questions for Frank?
Well, with that I’d like to. . .
JL: Invite him to BachoTEX.
PN: Ahh!
FMi: I hope it’s going to happen next year again.

created between heads. So if you have those heads
together in one place, and people don’t go away, thenthere are chances for ideas. New ideas or solutions
and things like that. And it’s nice to hug people.
FMi: Yes, and to have a joint beer. And all thesekinds of things that I’m currently missing. So I’msitting here with a glass of water, that’s all.
JL: And a glass of beer underneath the table.
FMi: I am not telling.

PN: Yes, no, nice to see you in person, nice tobe such a good sport for an interview like this one.
And I sincerely hope to see you all and BachoTEX isprobably the best environment for all of this.
FMi: Oh yeah, that is absolutely lovely.
PN: And now just the time that you have to beable to talk to people outside the talk settings. It’s
absolutely wonderful and I hope I’ll have the courage
to make that trip the next time that happens.
JL: Thank you.
PN: Thank you, thank you.

Steve Grathwohl: Thank you, Paulo and Frank.
That was wonderful. I too hope to see all of you in
person next year somewhere.
FMi: Yeah. We haven’t seen each other for a longtime.
Steve Grathwohl: Yes, yes. It’s been challenging
for all of us.

JL: Yeah, yeah. Chances are probably not zero.

Hopefully the pandemic will let us get there. We
Paulo Ney de Souza

6 Explanatory note by Frank: of course I meant 2019 :-)