Introduction

Dear potential sponsor,

Thanks for visiting this page and continuing to read. Since more than 30 years I'm contributing to open source projects, in particular to the development and maintenance of LaTeX; details are listed below. In parallel, I worked most of the time in the IT industry as an architect for EDS and HP.

I'm proud to be able to say that with LaTeX we are literally serving millions of users worldwide with just a handful of volunteers doing the development and maintenance.

In 2017 I decided to stop my industry career and concentrate solely on my open source involvement (and some occasional free-lance consulting work to pay the bills).

Any funding via Github Sponsors will help me to reduce the still necessary free-lance activities and spend even more time on further developing and supporting LaTeX, so thank you for that!

LaTeX related activities

During my student days I fell in love with the beautiful typesetting possibilities offered by TeX and I started to develop packages like array, doc, multicol, NFSS (the font selection scheme of LaTeX), etc.

Then in 1989, when it became clear that a new LaTeX implementation was badly needed, Leslie Lamport offered me the chance to take over the future development and maintenance of LaTeX. Since these days (i.e., for 35 years now) I've been leading this effort, which is delivering today's premier computer typesetting software to you, or enables you to use it in online portals like Overleaf, etc.

LaTeX (2e)

Together with a handful of friends I set out at the beginning of the '90s to replace LaTeX 2.09 with a fundamentally overhauled version, ready for the next decades, and in 1993 LaTeX2e saw the light of the day. This version is still at the core of what you are using today, when you typeset documents with LaTeX, albeit in many directions further developed and enhanced.

Between then and now, the core LaTeX software has seen an average of 2-3 releases per year, and in addition the functionality was extended by many new packages over time (authored by us and by many other developers).

LaTeX 3

In parallel to developing LaTeX2e we did work on what was termed LaTeX3. However, computers at the time were way too slow to adequately support the new ideas and features and so, with a lot of regrets, we finally gave up on it---we were just too early.

By the beginning of this decade the situation had drastically changed. The problems we tried to address in the '90s were still unsolved, but computers got sufficiently fast, so that our ideas could now be turned into usable code.
At first we converted the original code into a LaTeX package (named expl3, and that name stuck for some reason), and over time more and more packages started to use it. For example, if you are using one of the modern Unicode TeX engines, then under the hood important parts use expl3 because, for example, all the OpenType font management is written in expl3.
As of 2020-02-02 this code has been integrated in the core LaTeX format under the name L3 programming layer.

Articles, conference papers and other artifacts about the LaTeX2 and LaTeX3 work from my co-workers and me can be found at https://www.latex-project.org/publications/.

Tasks sponsored through your support

Besides general work on improving and further developing LaTeX, there are a number of areas that I work on or would like to work on, if possible.

• The most important task that I'm currently focussing on is making LaTeX automatically produce well-tagged PDF, so that documents produced with it require no or very little work to meet important accessibility standards such as the new PDF/UA-2. Such standards are getting more and more important and this work will then also allow reuse of such PDFs in new and interesting ways.

This project is well under way and you find details on status and future plans at https://www.latex-project.org/publications/indexbytopic/pdf/ and on https://github.com/latex3/tagging-project.

• Another area I have labored on (for nearly 5 years) was the new edition of "The LaTeX Companion". Like the first two editions of this book, a large part of this work consists in working with package authors to help correcting bugs, improving their package documentation, and/or suggesting missing features. Unfortunately, more often these days, it also meant taking over the support for packages that are important, but have been abandoned by their original authors.

This project has finished successfully with the publication of the book in 2023 (2 volumes with a total of 1984 pages) and in 2024 with a pdf and epub version.

• Finally, albeit currently only on the waiting list, I hope to find the time and the financial resources to move my research work on "Automated pagination of documents with floats" from a prototype to a fully working system for everybody to use. See https://www.latex-project.org/publications/indexbytopic/pagination/ for details.