Those of you who have been following my activity for the last few years will recall my frequent comments “the thesis is almost done” — for the last several years. Well, has it been? All that time?

The past year has been a combination of too many mini-projects for me: code and papers for my PhD; fontspec and unicode-math in XeLaTeX and LuaLaTeX; the Herries Press collection of packages; the continued development of LaTeX3; teaching and lecturing; and more besides. My responsibilities seem to be compounding rather than settling down. My actual thesis has seen far less attention than it should have.

“Why, I feel all thin, sort of stretched, if you know what I mean: like butter that has been scraped over too much bread. That can’t be right. I need a change, or something.”

I wish it didn’t have to come to this, but as of today I’m not going to be able to devote any significant time to the LaTeX world until my thesis is complete. I’ll still be answering support emails when I can, and I’ll release bug fixes for urgent problems, but don’t expect to hear too much from me for the next six months.

I’m sorry to let down those with whom I’m working fairly closely on a couple of different things. Rest assured I’ll be back and able to spend some real time on everything once I’ve got the monkey off my back.