TUGboat, Volume 37 (2016), No. 2
R.I.P. — S.P.Q.R
Sebastian Patrick Quintus Rahtz(13.2.1955–15.3.2016)
Frank Mittelbach and Joan Richmond(translator)*
There are a small number of people in the worldwide
TEX community whose activities in the nineties havebeen instrumental in shaping the TEX world as weknow it today. Sebastian Rahtz, known also by theabbreviation SPQR, was without any doubt one ofthis group.
Sebastian was born as the fifth child (Quintus)
of a family of archaeologists, which shaped the wholeof his future life. He began his career with an M.A. inarchaeology and as late as 2009 he was still describing
the Protestant graveyard in Rome as the place inwhich he most enjoyed being [5].
Already during his earlytime as a university lecturer
in Humanities Computing at
Southampton University, hebecame involved with typesetting classical texts, suchas “The Lexicon of Greek
Personal Names” (LGPN),
and at some point he camein contact with TEX, whichthen became the centre of his
work for almost two decades.
After Southampton, heworked for some time as afreelance consultant at several places, including CERN,
Sebastian, colorful as
where he worked with Michel
always in one of his striking
Goossens. After that he took
outfits — 2005
a post with Elsevier, where
he was principally involved
with TEX and its use in scientific publishing. Roughly
at the turn of the millennium he moved over to become Information Manager at the Oxford University
Computing Services (OUCS), and in the following
years undertook various positions in higher management there.
Sebastian was a pragmatist, who did things
when they had to be done, so it is not surprising thata number of things which were significant for thespread and further development of TEX and LATEX
can be traced back to him. A great deal of this was* Mrs. Richmond kindly agreed to translate the German textthat originally appeared in TEXnische Komödie, the journalof the German TEX user group, DANTE e.V. [4]. She is theauthor of the book “Nine letters from an artist: the familiesof William Gillard”.

901
confined to “behind the scenes” operations, as community service, and consequently is not necessarily
known by the substantial majority of today’s TEXusers, but all these activities were hugely importantat the time and exercised a decisive influence on theway TEX is presented to its users today.
In the eighties crucially important aspects were
the further spread of TEX, the porting of the programs to new operating systems, the development ofprinter drivers for new devices and the like. Distributions existed as “tapes” for individual operating
systems and Sebastian began his TEX life as a coordinator and distributor of tapes for SunOS.
His engagement in themaintenance and expansionof the Aston TEX archive(working with Peter Abbott and others) was a logical next step, from which
CTAN (the ComprehensiveTEX Archive Network) wassubsequently born, so that
Sebastian is effectively oneof the founding fathers ofCTAN as we know it today.
In those days, an Internet connection for mostTEX users was either rudimentary (a 300kbps modemwas usual) or not available atall, so that the distributionof TEX software via floppy
discs, CDs and later DVDs
Sebastian at the “Poetry
became of decisive imporContest” — Vancouver 1999
tance with the rise of distributions for Atari, PC, Amigaand other computer systems. Anyone who still owns
a TEX Live disc from that period can verify that
Sebastian’s name appears as editor. He was theone who constructed the first TEX Live installation(based on the Unix distribution of Thomas Esser),and over the next few years, together with a few
other volunteers, he continually improved it. The
first seven or eight TEX Live productions carry his
name as the responsible editor into the year 2004.
As I see it, both CTAN and TEX Live are vitally
important milestones in the history of TEX, without
which we would perhaps no longer know and use TEX
and LATEX today, since they were absolutely decisive
for wider distribution of the software.
But Sebastian’s name is also linked to several
macro packages which are still important today, despite the fact that he played down the importance of
this work in an interview with Dave Walden [5]: these

R.I.P. — S.P.Q.R Sebastian Patrick Quintus Rahtz (13.2.1955–15.3.2016)

902
include the early versions of graphics, producedwith David Carlisle, and the monumental package
hyperref which subsequently saw further development by Heiko Oberdiek.
In the new millennium Sebastian turned hisattention to new tasks outside the world of TEX,
among which are his activities on TEI (Text CodingInitiative) and OSS Watch. It is fair to say that theXML world fascinated and absorbed him in the same
way that the TEX world had done decades before.
Sebastian was in many respects a model for us toimitate. He never left construction sites behind him(such as one encounters all too often in the world ofTEX and elsewhere), but always left behind him workthat was ordered and finished, and — when he nolonger had enough energy or interest in something —he never clung to it but happily handed it on in goodtime and in good condition to a successor.
I no longer recall exactly when I got to know
Sebastian personally, but it
must have been sometime at
the beginning of the nineties.
In the course of the following years we attacked various projects together. The
most important of these are
the NFSS (New Font Selection Scheme for LATEX), in
which he undertook the integration of the 35 standard
PostScript fonts and later
the book projects The LATEXGraphics Companion [1, 2]
Sebastian “preaching”
about XML and Passiveand The LATEX Web ComTEX, with a t-shirt frompanion [3].
San Francisco (1997);
Ever since then I havein our hearts we are allvalued him as both colleague
traditionalists, I still own
and friend, and there are athis too — Oxford 2000
number of activities which I
would like to remember. To
start with, the nightly coding sessions (via e-mail),
during which I once asked him how he could combinethat with the care of his little daughter. To which
he replied that she kept him awake, lay on his lap
and helped him. Whereupon he sent me a pictureof Matilde (6 months old) and himself “working together”. Or a walk on a free day during a conference,during which he dragged me forcibly into a bookshop, ran straight to the children’s section, hunted
out a book that was completely unknown to me, andsaid “Buy”. It looked rather odd, with the pictureof a boy wearing glasses, but I followed his advice,bought it, and began to read it that same evening.
Frank Mittelbach and Joan Richmond

TUGboat, Volume 37 (2016), No. 2
By four o’clock the following morning I had finishedit, and would rather not want to know how my lecture went that morning. The book was by a still
fairly unknown woman writer at that time, and wascalled “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone”.
Sebastian was a “philosopher in his own right”,
with a lovable, dry English sense of humor, which
often delighted me. This spring, his journey ended
due to cancer. My thoughts are with him and hisfamily.
Rest In Peace, S.P.Q.R.
References[1] Michel Goossens, Sebastian Rahtz, andFrank Mittelbach. The LATEX Graphics
Companion: Illustrating Documents with TEX
and PostScript. Addison-Wesley series on Tools
and Techniques for Computer Typesetting.
Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA, USA, 1997.
[2] Michel Goossens, Frank Mittelbach, SebastianRahtz, Denis Roegel, and Herbert Voß,editors. The LATEX Graphics Companion.
Addison-Wesley series on Tools and Techniques
for Computer Typesetting. Addison-Wesley,Reading, MA, USA, second edition, 2008.
[3] Michel Goossens and Sebastian Rahtz. The
LATEX Web Companion: Integrating TEX,
HTML, and XML. Addison-Wesley series
on Tools and Techniques for Computer
Typesetting. Addison-Wesley Longman,Reading, MA, USA, 1999. With Eitan M.
Gurari and Ross Moore and Robert S. Sutor.
[4] Frank Mittelbach. Sebastian Patrick Quintus
Rahtz. Die TEXnische Komödie, 2/16, S. 24–27,
Mai 2016.
[5] David Walden. Interview with Sebastian Rahtz,
2009. https://tug.org/interviews/rahtz.
html.

Sebastian among his family: Inês, Leonorand Matilde — 2014