the Spanish-speakers' TeX user's group

1  History, Goals, Membership

CervanTeX, was born as an informal user's group with the name of GUTH (Grupo de Usuarios de TeX hispanohablantes), during the last months of 1993, as an outcome of the discussions on the spanish-tex mailing list and on the USENET newsgroups comp.text.tex and es.eunet.spanish-tex.

In 1994, the aims of the group were then defined as to foster:

• Spanish-TeX/LaTeX implementations
• Extending the use of TeX-LaTeX 
• The translation and localization of formats and styles
• Collaboration with the international TUG

In the following years, the group was consolidated, the number of members grew and a more formalised framework was established. Within it, the following tasks were ensued,

• A formal constitution of the group
• The maintenance of the spanish-TeX FAQ
• Publications
• Development of tools for spanish-TeX
• Adaptation of the Babel and related multilingual tools
• Translation and localization of formats and styles
• Development and maintenance of WWW and ftp sites

In March 1996, José Luis Ruiz, from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, proposed CervanTeX as the name of the group, as a homage to the famous spanish writer Miguel de Cervantes, author of ``El Quijote'', and his proposal was accepted unanimously.

At present, CervanTeX is a fully-operating group. The formal constitution as a non-profit organization was made in March this year, and a provisional board was set-up to be composed by Javier Bezos, José Ra Portillo and Juan Luis Varona. We had our first regular general meeting past September (see Section 6) and an election process is now in progress.

CervanTeX is currently formed by 145 members from 17 countries of Europe and America (mainly Spain and Latin America, see Table 1), organised in different workgroups (see Section 2).

2  Work Groups

There are, at present, the following work groups in CervanTeX:

• Publications. The coordinator is the General Editor of CervanTeX, Javier Bezos (see Section 3).
• Implementation of spanish-TeX over several platforms,

  • LinuX: under the coordination of Enrique Meléndez. This workgroup will try, if possible, to also coordinate the implementation over other UniX and related systems.

  • MacOS: coordinated by Juan Luis Varona

  • Windows: the coordinator is José Manuel Calabuig. CervanTeX recommends the combination WinEdt-MikTeX\ for the use of TeX over the Windows system.
• METAPOST: Santiago Muelas coordinates this group.
• F.A.Q.: The list of Frequently Asked Questions for TeX\ in Spanish in now maintained by Agustín Martín Domingo.
• Ftp: is also coordinated by Juan Luis Varona
• Web: José Ra Portillo maintains the official CervanTeX web site.
• Multilingual Systems: Javier Bezos is the CervanTeX coordinator of this group. He gives also support for the spanish files used in Babel and Omega.
• Translation and localization: This group is still in the phase of setting-up and has not yet a coordinator.

3  Publications

CervanTeX publishes a bulletin called TeXemplares. The Editor General of the group (at present, Javier Bezos) is also the Editor of this publication. The first issue was distributed in March 99 and the second is in the process of edition.

4  Distributions

Distributions of spanish-TeX are available at the CervanTeX ftp server (see Section 5) for some platforms. Tools (dictionaries, documentation, the proceedings of the first meeting, keyboard settings, etc), specific files (for Babel, hyphenation and some classes and styles translated to spanish), and CervanTeX specific files (constitution act, minutes of the general assembly, etc) can also be found there.

The DANTE edition of a CD with the CTAN contents as of May 1999 has been also distributed for CervanTeX members; for future years, the edition of a CD with the specific tools for spanish-TeX is foreseen.

5  Web, Servers, Discussion lists

CervanTeX has an official web site: http://apolo.us.es/CervanTeX/ maintained by José Ra Portillo hosted in a server property of the Dpto. de Matemática Aplicada I de la Universidad de Sevilla (Spain). This web site is mirrored in the University de Chile (Chile), the I.N.R.I.A. (France), the Universidad Autónoma de Puebla (Mexico) and the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (Spain). A complete list of mirrors with links to them is available at the main page of CervanTeX.

The web site contains pages (including lots of links) devoted to:

• information about the CervanTeX group: activities, meetings, board, directory, workgroups, etc.
• a brief introduction to TeX and spanish-TeX.
• info for spanish-TeX: mail lists, newsgroups, web pages, books, tutorials, F.A.Q., etc.
• tools for spanish-TeX: hyphenation, dictionaries, multilingual systems, BibTeX customization, spanish index generation tools, etc.
• links to sources of information about TeX in other languages.
• links to and info about the TUG, other LUGs, freeware, shareware and commercial implementations of TeX and curiosities about TeX.

 The Universidad de La Rioja has kindly provided an FTP server for the distribution of CervanTeX related files. This repository can be accessed at ftp://tex.unirioja.es/pub/tex.

A CTAN mirror is available in Spain provided by RedIris and there also is a partial CTAN mirror hosted in a server property of the Universidad de Chile (Chile). Both are linked from the CervanTeX web site.

A mailing discussion list spanish-tex@eunet.es exists. Althought this list is not maintained by CervanTeX, is the main forum of discussion about spanish-TeX. Info about the list is also available on the web pages of CervanTeX.

6  Bursaries, Meetings and Congress, Projects

CervanTeX celebrated its first regular general congress (EGUTH'99) on September 13th-14th at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (Spain). The congress included invited talks, contributed papers, round tables and two training sessions, for beginners and advanced users of TeX. The first General Assembly of CervanTeX was held on September 14th.

The second EGUTH will be held in September 2001 in a not yet determined place.

• Las páginas Web de CervanTeX están situadas actualmente en el servidor WWW del Departamento de Matemática Aplicada 1 de la Universidad de Sevilla (Spain), situado en la Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura al que agradecemos profundamente este servicio. Se ruega comunicar las deficiencias por electrocorreo a webmaster@apolo.us.es.

• Mantenimiento de esta página: José Ra Portillo. (mailto: josera@us.es).
• Última actualización: 28 de Junio del 2000.

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