Sufficiently Advanced TeXnology

TeX Hacks

Our newsletters were prepared using TeX, arguably the best typesetting system on the planet. Not everyone thinks so, but for sheer flexibility, it can't be beat (Yet. There are also Latte, Curl, and Basser Lout). I wrote a fairly extensive TeX configuration (called a format by TeXnicians) called news to do the typesetting in the newsletters. There is no documentation for it, but the TeX source is available for "Entering Northern Ireland". I also have some smaller custom TeX for handling lead sheets and my letterhead (which uses the paper module from news).

The newsletter masthead also has a custom font designed using Metafont, a companion tool to TeX.