I arrived home yesterday from TUG 2010 in San Francisco. What a great conference!

It was held over three very full days with a registration/get-together the night before. Earlier still, members of the MacTeX mailing list met to discuss what’s going on and (for me, anyway) meet each other for the first time.

The venue was the Sir Francis Drake hotel, which I found charming. On entering the hotel you see not the check-in desk but rather a very welcoming lounge and bar, with a fully stocked liquor selection and bartenders who know how to use it. That’s my kind of place.

I had been staying in the hotel for several days spending time with Chris Rowley and Frank Mittelbach. Great guys; lots of walking and eating and most of all talking.

When the conference started, I became a little overwhelmed with the number of people that I knew online from the TeX community, of whom I tried to meet and talk with as many as I could but still didn’t spend as much time as I would have liked with most. It was just great to finally meet everyone and put faces to names.

One of the things that really struck me is the different groups of people that all come together for these conferences. CTAN, TeX Live, MacTeX, XeTeX, LuaTeX, Plain TeX users, LaTeX users, LaTeX developers, and more. Through the work of all these people and more we have a community that fosters the development of all these tools we use.

Over the next few days I’ll try to summarise my reactions to the presentations that were given in the conference. If you wish to watch any of the talks, head to River Valley TV, where talks are being uploaded periodically as soon as they are processed into viewable form.