DebConf 18 – Day 3

Most of Japan is on summer vacation now, only a small village in the north resists the siege, so I am continuing my reports on DebConf. See DebConf 18 – Day 1 and DebConf 18 – Day 2 for the previous ones.

With only a few talks of interest for me in the morning, I spent the time preparing my second presentation Status of Japanese (and CJK) typesetting (with TeX in Debian) during the morning, and joined for lunch and the afternoon session.

First to attend was the Deep Learning BoF by Mo Zou. Mo reported on the problems of getting Deep Learning tools into Debian: Here not only the pure software, where proprietary drivers for GPU acceleration are often highly advisable, but also the data sets (pre-trained data) which often fall under a non-free license, pose problems with integration into Debian. With several deep learning practitioners around, we had a lively discussion how to deal with all this.

Next up was Markus Koschany with Debian Java, where he gave an overview on the packaging tools for Java programs and libraries, and their interaction with the Java build tools like Maven, Ant, and Gradle.

After the coffee break I gave my talk about Status of Japanese (and CJK) typesetting (with TeX in Debian), and I must say I was quite nervous. As a non CJK-native foreigner speaking about the intricacies of typesetting with Kanji was a bit a challenge. At the end I think it worked out quite well, and I got some interesting questions after the talk.

Last for today was Nathan Willis’ presentation Rethinking font packages—from the document level down. With design, layout, and fonts being close to my personal interests, too, this talk was one of the highlights for me. Starting from a typical user’s workflow in selecting a font set for a specific project, Nathan discussed the current situation of fonts in Linux environment and Debian, and suggested improvements. Unfortunately what would be actually needed is a complete rewrite of the font stack, management, system organization etc, a rather big task at hand.

After the group photo shot by Aigars Mahinovs who also provided several more photos and a relaxed dinner I went climbing with Paul Wise to a nearby gym. It was – not surprisingly – quite humid and warm in the gym, so the amount of sweat I lost was considerable, but we had some great boulders and a fun time. In addition to that, I found a very nice book, nice out of two reasons: first, it was about one of my (and my daughters – seems to be connected) favorite movies, Totoro by Miyazaki Hayao, and second, it was written in Taiwanese Mandarin with some kind of Furigana to aid reading for kids – something that is very common in Japan (even in books for adults in case of rare readings), but I have never seen before with Chinese. The proper name is Zhùyīn Zìmǔ 註音字母 or (or more popular) Bopomofo.

This interesting and long day finished in my hotel with a cold beer to compensate for the loss of minerals during climbing.