Minutes of the First general meeting

Date:: September 7, 2024
Location:: Online
Agenda:: Resurrecting tugindia
Attendees:: Abhijat Vichare, Aravind Rajendran, E. Krishnan, Niranjan, C. V. Radhakrishnan, S. Rahul Krishnan, C. V. Rajagopal, K. V. Rajeesh, T. Rishikesan Nair, A. M. Shanmugam Pillai, Sushant Devlekar

tugindia is not a new venture. It was previously established in 1998. Due to lack of community interest, it ceased to exist in a few years. After 22 years, Indian TEX users again decided to come together and revive the lost collective. Three office-bearing members of the original tugindia 1998, i.e., E. Krishnan, C. V. Radhakrishnan and C. V. Rajagopal participated in this meeting and showed active interest in this venture. Unlike tugindia 1998, which had most members from Kerala, this time few faces from Maharashtra too appeared. This document summarises the proceedings of the meeting.

An overview of the proceedings

In this section, we have a bird’s-eye view of the meeting. In the later sections, we report the specifics.

A brief self-introduction round.
C. V. Radhakrishnan opened the meeting, introduced the motive behind this initiative.
Niranjan elaborated on the projects planned as a part of tugindia activities.
The panel democratically elected the board of directors.
The session was opened for discussion, suggestions and questions. People voluntarily took up certain responsibilities.
The meeting concluded.

The elected board of directors

The following members were commendated for the respective positions of tugindia and were unanimously elected by the panel:

President:: E. Krishnan
Vice president:: K. V. Rajeesh
Secretary:: Niranjan
Joint secretary:: S. Rahul Krishnan
Treasurer:: (to be filled)
Legal advisor:: Aravind Rajendran

Plans

It was proposed and decided that tugindia will undertake the following activities:

Spreading awareness about TEX in India.
Creating support for Indian languages in LATEX including fonts, hyphenation, translations etc.
Releasing TEXFolio, a user-centered, community web-editor for LATEX.
Releasing the udiss bundle which supports typesetting university dissertations.
A multilingual yearly journal with Crossref and doi will be published.
The official url of tugindia will be: https://tug.org.in .

Miscellaneous

Apart from the well defined projects enlisted above, some general discussions and important comments by some members are summarised in this section.

Abhijat Vichare suggested that tugindia should have a vision statement. Upon discussion, the following was finalised as the same:
Localising LATEX in Indian context.
C. V. Radhakrishnan suggested promoting TEX digitally and using free software-based social media for this. The Mastodon project was selected for this. Rajeesh took up the responsibility of setting up the Mastodon server and Niranjan took up the responsibility of its content.
C. V. Radhakrishnan volunteered for the revival of https://tug.org.in and Niranjan has decided to curate the content for it.
A. M. Shanmugam Pillai volunteered for managing the timelines and calendars of tugindia activities.