TUG has collected many interviews over the years. If you know of
others that would be useful to add here, or would like to do new
interviews, please see interview background
information below.
There are two basic ideas behind this list of interviews:
(a) technology is created by and evolves with use by people, and
the points of view and backgrounds of the people influence the
technology; (b) there are lots of people who are relatively new to
the TeX community and therefore do not know much about the people who
are already significant contributors to the community.
Twenty
Questions for Donald Knuth: for the publication of the eBook
versions of TAOCP, questions for Knuth were collected from various
people, he answered them, and the “virtual Q&A” was posted
on the web.
The Essential Knuth, a booklet length interview of Knuth by
Edgar Daylight conducted November 23, 2012, Lonely Scholar Scientific
Books, Hevelee, Belgium, 2013; a review of this booklet appeared in
TUGboat, Vol.34
(2013), No.3. A second extended interview with Daylight was
published as Algorithmic Barriers Falling: P=NP? in 2014; a review was
published in TUGboat Vol.36 No.1.
145 pages of “conversations” (i.e., an extended
interview) between Knuth and his publisher Dikran Karagueuzian in
Companion to the Papers of Donald Knuth, 2012. the topics covered
in this interview are listed in a review of the
book (TUGboat Vol.33 No.1).
General: Donald Knuth Lectures, 111 lectures digitized by the Stanford
Center for Professional Development and available through a youtube
playlist. Many of these are also individually listed below.
2017-12-09: Donald E. Knuth lectures, digitized by the Stanford Center for
Professional Development. Includes “Experiments with Digital
Halftones”, “Mathematical Writing”, “CS144C
classroom lectures about disk storage and B-trees”, and
“Christmas tree lecture 2017”.
2014-06-16: Problems Philippe Would Have Liked (slides),
Flajolet Lecture at the 25th International Conference on Probabilistic,
Combinatorial and Asymptotic Methods for the Analysis of Algorithms.
2006-04: Web of Stories, series of 97 videos commissioned by the Peoples
Archive. Interviewer: Dikran Karagueuzian.
Transcript.
Some TeX-related and other selections:
In preparation for TUG 2010:
TeX's 25 anniversary, we expanded
our interview series to include Stanford students who worked with Don
Knuth to develop TeX and Metafont in the late 1970s and into the
mid-1980s. The TeX Project people we interviewed are:
All but one of the above people have a chapter in the commemorative book we
prepared for TUG2010. All of them, along with Knuth, participated in a
panel discussion during the
conference.
These are the interviews conducted by Dave Walden. The list is
alphabetical by last name. The one or two activities listed for each
interviewee are meant as just a hint about each interviewee and
are accurate as of the date of the interview. We do not update the
interviews after they are published.
TUG published a book containing the
interviews through March 2009, with additional material. There is
a discount for TUG members.
A program generated the HTML for these interviews, based on the
system of m4 files described in our paper about this interviews project;
the same files produced the book.
Pavneet Arora (interview completed 2016-05-24): Pavneet Arora has participated in TUG annual conferences since 2010 and is the local organizer of TUG 2016 in Toronto.
Kaveh Bazargan and CV Radhakrishnan (interview completed 2006-09-21): Kaveh Bazargan and CV Radhakrishnan use TeX extensively in their typesetting
business.
Barbara Beeton (interview completed 2005-11-24): Barbara Beeton has been editor of TUGboat for 22 years and a
member of the TUG Board since it was called the steering committee. She
also serves as a liaison for TeXnical issues between Donald Knuth and
the TeX community.
Karl Berry (interview completed 2005-09-27): Karl Berry has been a long-time board member of TUG, became TUG president in 2003, and was subsequently elected for
further terms. Among other projects, he is co-administrator of the
tug.org server, co-editor of TeX Live,
and a member of the TUGboat production
team.
Javier Bezos (interview completed 2020-07-25): Javier Bezos is the current maintainer and developer of Babel. Javier has also written or contributed to many other packages for print production.
Duane Bibby (interview completed 2006-05-19): Cartoonist Duane Bibby is well known for the lion illustrations used in numerous TeX books, starting with The
TeXbook, and by TeX user groups.
Jon Breitenbucher (interview completed 2008-05-22): Jon Breitenbucher is interested in the use of TeX in educational situations and is a member of the TUG board.
Mimi Burbank (interview completed 2005-09-06): Mimi Burbank (1941–2010) served as a member of the TUGboat
production team and and a member of the TUG board.
David Carlisle (interview completed 2007-06-20): David Carlisle is a member of the LaTeX team and deeply involved with issues of typesetting and displaying mathematics,
including being an Invited Expert on the W3C Math Working Group.
Lance Carnes (interview completed 2004-12-13): Lance Carnes founded Personal TeX, Inc., in 1985
and has been providing PCTeX ever since.
Bart Childs (interview completed 2010-05-10): Bart Childs was extensively involved in the early distribution of TeX and early governance of TUG.
Jin-Hwan Cho (interview completed 2007-05-21): Jin-Hwan Cho is the maintainer of the DVIPDFMx translator, and a leader in supporting and encouraging the use of TeX in
Korea.
Malcolm Clark (interview completed 2011-02-09): Malcolm Clark is a past president of TUG.
John Culleton (interview completed 2006-12-02): John Culleton uses TeX in his indexing and typesetting business. He also participates in various Internet-based
discussion groups related to printing and publishing where he is vocal
about using TeX for typesetting.
Susan DeMeritt and Cheryl Ponchin (interview completed 2007-10-11): Cheryl Ponchin and Susan DeMeritt are both members of the TUG Board of Directors (Sue is
secretary of the board), give workshops on LaTeX, and use TeX daily in
their technical typing work.
Victor Eijkhout (interview completed 2005-03-21): Victor Eijkhout is the author of the book TeX
by Topic and several LaTeX packages, a long-time participant on
comp.text.tex and various mailing lists, and was formerly associate
TUGboat editor for macros.
Thomas Esser (interview completed 2006-06-05): Thomas Esser created and maintained the popular teTeX distribution of TeX.
Robin Fairbairns (interview completed 2005-02-16): Robin Fairbairns maintains the TeX FAQ and the UK CTAN node. He is also a
member of the LaTeX Project
team.
Jonathan Fine (interview completed 2008-12-14): Jonathan Fine is a long time participant in the TeX community. He is current chair of the UK TeX Users Group and is
employed supporting TeX at the Open University.
Ulrike Fischer (interview completed 2009-11-20): Ulrike Fischer is very active in various on-line TeX discussion groups and has written several chess-related packages.
Peter Flynn (interview completed 2006-09-19): Peter has worked on TeX interfaces at many levels for many
years, including SGML, XML, dual web and print presentations, within
the context of excellent typography. He is also a past board member
of TUG.
David Fuchs (interview completed 2007-05-14): David Fuchs is renowned in the TeX community for his work with Donald Knuth in the earliest days of TeX.
Federico Garcia-de Castro (interview completed 2016-08-17): Federico Garcia-De Castro is a composer of music, passionate for chess, and a lover of TeX.
Michel Goossens (interview completed 2013-06-14): Michel Goossens is well known for the LaTeX Companion books and was president of TUG from 1995–1997.
Peter Gordon (interview completed 2008-01-08): Peter Gordon is the editor at Addison Wesley for Donald Knuth's books and the company's TeX and LaTeX books.
George Grätzer (interview completed 2005-04-13): George Grätzer is a mathematician who has written books on TeX and LaTeX and edits a journal prepared in LaTeX.
Eitan Gurari (profile compiled in July 2009; Eitan died before we could do an interview): Eitan Gurari was a long term contributor to the TeX community. He was on our list to interview, but
we had not gotten to him yet at the time of his death.
This profile was compiled after his death.
Hans Hagen (interview completed 2006-03-02): Hans Hagen is the principal author and developer of ConTeXt, past president of
NTG, and active in many other areas of the
TeX community.
Idris Hamid (interview completed 2009-11-01): Idris is best known in the TeX community for his work in developing better typesetting for Arabic-script languages such as Arabic, Persian, and
Urdu.
Hàn Thế Thành (interview completed 2008-07-24): Hàn Thế Thành is the creator of and still maintains pdfTeX.
Yannis Haralambous (interview completed 2009-01-06): Yannis Haralambous is well known for his Omega system and his study of non-Latin fonts.
Jim Hefferon (interview completed 2007-08-13): Jim Hefferon is one of the key maintainers of CTAN and a member of the TUG board.
Amy Hendrickson (interview completed 2008-09-14): Amy Hendrickson has made her living for over twenty years as a TeX/LaTeX macro writer for publishing companies and academic societies;
she also does book production and teaches LaTeX.
John Hobby (interview completed 2010-01-05): John Hobby was the developer of MetaPost and helped develop the Metafont algorithms.
Taco Hoekwater (interview completed 2006-10-13): Taco Hoekwater is heavily involved in implementing many significant upgrades and improvements to various TeX-based systems.
Klaus Höppner (interview completed 2005-02-20): Klaus Höppner is the president of DANTE, the German TeX user group and
a member of the TUG board.
Kris Holmes (interview completed 2018-10-01): Kris Holmes is one-half of the Bigelow & Holmes design studio. She has worked in the areas of typeface
design, calligraphy, lettering, signage and graphic
design, screenwriting, filmmaking, and writing about
the preceding.
Bogusław Jackowski and Janusz Marian Nowacki (interview completed 2008-09-27): Bogusław Jackowski and Janusz Marian Nowacki have made and continue to make many important
contributions in the world of TeX fonts.
Mimi Jett (interview completed 2012-06-01): Mimi Jett served on the TUG board for 15 years, including as president.
David Kastrup (interview completed 2006-08-21): David Kastrup is a frequent contributor to comp.text.tex and manifestly a TeXnician (see the answer to Exercise 1.1
in The TeXbook).
Oleg Katsitadze (interview completed 2007-08-04): Oleg Katsitadze maintains Eplain and is a contributor
to Texinfo.
Jonathan Kew (interview completed 2007-04-03): Jonathan Kew is best known in the TeX community as the developer of XeTeX.
Philip Kime (interview completed 2020-07-25): Philip Kime is the author of Biber and current developer and main lead of BibLATEX.
Dick Koch (interview completed 2007-07-12): Dick Koch is the creator and lead developer of TeXShop, a renowned front end for TeX on MacOSX.
Werner Lemberg (interview completed 2006-04-28): Werner Lemberg developed the CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) package for LaTeX and has been involved in a number
of other computer-based typesetting projects.
Raph Levien (interview completed 2009-05-16): Raph Levien is a programmer with a special interest in graphics applied to type. He is also a typeface designer. He holds
several patents and is a past maintainer of Ghostscript.
Frank Liang (interview completed 2010-07-28): Frank Liang worked with Don Knuth on the hyphenation algorithm for TeX78, and Frank's PhD thesis presented a better hyphenation
algorithm that was used in the TeX we know today and has been used by many
other typesetting systems.
Dan Luecking (interview completed 2004-11-08): Dan Luecking's answers on comp.text.tex are models of precision.
David MacKay (interview completed 2009-02-10): David MacKay (1967–2016) was a scientist at Cambridge University and an enthusiastic user of LaTeX.
Pierre MacKay (interview done in early 2007): Pierre MacKay (1933–2015) was
a classics professor
who was a TUG board member from 1983–1991, TUG president
from 1983–1985, and Unix site coordinator from
1983–1992. He was with TUG from the start.
Adriana McCrea and Aleksander Simonic (interview completed 2006-06-28): Aleksander Simonic and Adriana McCrea are the “WinEdt team” that develops and supports the WinEdt editor
popular with many MS Windows users of TeX.
Frank Mittelbach (interview
completed 2006-01-11): Frank Mittelbach has been the leader of the
LaTeX Project for many years. 2021 video interview
with Frank, conducted by Paulo Ney de Souza.
Ross Moore (interview completed 2007-12-12): Ross Moore is a long-time TUG board member and TeX contributor, especially in the areas of mathematics and Unicode
support.
Robert Morris (interview completed 2018-04-17): Bob Morris was involved in the birth of the TeX Users Group in 1980, and he led state-of-the-art digital typography research at
University of Massachusetts Boston.
R.I.P. Bob Morris, TUGboat 42:1.
Janusz Marian Nowacki and Bogusław Jackowski (interview completed 2008-09-27): Bogusław Jackowski and Janusz Marian Nowacki have made and continue to make many important
contributions in the world of TeX fonts.
Arthur Ogawa (interview completed 2008-07-14): Arthur Ogawa is a long time member of the TUG board and well-known package developer.
Haruhiko Okumura (interview completed 2007-06-04): Haruhiko Okumura promotes and supports the use of TeX in Japan.
Scott Pakin (interview completed 2017-02-05): Scott Pakin has developed many LaTeX packages and other TeX-related tools.
Richard Palais (interview completed 2011-07-09): Dick Palais was the first president (then called the chairman) of TUG.
Oren Patashnik (interview completed 2016-06-26): Oren Patashnik is well known as the creator of BibTeX; his graduate student days at Stanford overlapped with the
TeX Project era and people.
Steve Peter (interview completed 2006-02-07): Steve Peter is a publisher and linguist, does freelance book design and typesetting, and uses TeX daily. He is also a member of the TUG board.
Michael Plass (interview completed 2009-12-20): Michael Plass was co-implementor of the original prototype for TeX.
Cheryl Ponchin and Susan DeMeritt (interview completed 2007-10-11): Cheryl Ponchin and Susan DeMeritt are both members of the TUG Board of Directors (Sue is
secretary of the board), give workshops on LaTeX, and use TeX daily in
their technical typing work.
CV Radhakrishnan and Kaveh Bazargan (interview completed 2006-09-21): Kaveh Bazargan and CV Radhakrishnan use TeX extensively in their typesetting
business.
Sebastian Rahtz (interview completed
2009-03-12): For 15 years, Sebastian Rahtz (1955–2016) was
involved in an amazing variety of TeX and TUG activities.
SPQR memoriams.
Arthur Reutenauer (interview completed 2009-03-03): Arthur Reutenauer is the president of Groupe francophone des utilisateurs de TeX (GUTenberg) and is active in other
aspects of TeX use and development.
Yuri Robbers (interview completed 2008-08-24): Yuri Robbers is a TeX user and is a production editor for The PracTeX Journal as well as maintaining the journal's web
site.
Will Robertson (interview completed 2007-03-25): Like many graduate students, Will Robertson has gotten involved with TeX; he is also representative of a minority of
such TeX-using graduate students who take the next step of contributing
significantly to the TeX community.
Tomas Rokicki (interview completed 2008-08-15): Tom Rokicki created dvips and TeX's original Pascal to C converter.
Christian Schenk (interview completed 2006-04-15): Christian Schenk is the author and principal developer of the popular MiKTeX distribution of TeX.
Rainer Schöpf (interview completed 2007-08-27): Rainer Schöpf was a co-founder of the LaTeX2e and CTAN projects, and is still a key maintainer of CTAN.
Herb Schulz (interview completed 2011-02-01): Herb Schulz is well known for the support he gives to users in the MacTeX world.
Michael Sharpe (interview completed 2017-09-11): Michael Sharpe has been using TeX since the mid-1980s. In more recent years he has been active in the TeX fonts world.
Aleksander Simonic and Adriana McCrea (interview completed 2006-06-28): Aleksander Simonic and Adriana McCrea are the “WinEdt team” that develops and supports the WinEdt editor
popular with many MS Windows users of TeX.
Nicola Talbot (interview completed 2007-05-25): Nicola Talbot is a LaTeX user, teacher, and package writer.
Phil Taylor (interview completed 2005-05-25): Philip Taylor is a long time TeX user/developer who chooses to work outside of the LaTeX framework. He
is also a member of the TUG board.
Christina Thiele (interview completed 2005-03-24): Christina Thiele has been typesetting with TeX since 1983, especially in
linguistics and other non-math/science fields. She is a past president
of TUG.
Luis Trabb Pardo (interview completed 2010-04-08): Donald Knuth has said that Luis Trabb Pardo was his “right hand man” for the development of TeX78.
Howard Trickey (interview completed 2010-03-23): Howard Trickey did one of the earliest ports of TeX to Unix.
Boris Veytsman (interview completed 2011-01-19): Boris Veytsman has written and maintains
many LaTeX and font-related packages and recently joined the TUG Board of Directors.
Mari Voipio (interview completed 2012-12-08): Mari Voipio uses ConTeXt and other TeX-world tools in her daily work and for her hobbies.
Herbert Voß (interview completed 2010-08-31): Herbert is best known for
his work with PSTricks and his German language books documenting LaTeX, etc.
Zofia Walczak (interview completed 2020-02-14): Zofia Walczak has been active in GUST since 1993. In recent
years she has been doing the translation to Polish of the TeX Live documentation.
Dave Walden (interview completed 2006-09-20): Dave Walden coordinates the TUG Interview Corner. This interview of him is intended to provide an answer to the question
some readers may have: “Who is this guy and why is he interviewing
TeX luminaries?”
Joe Weening (interview completed 2010-06-08): Joe Weening used TeX78 when he was first at Stanford, participated in the transition to TeX82, and continues to use (La)TeX
today.
Gerben Wierda (interview completed 2006-11-28): Gerben Wierda is well known for his tools for installing TeX and other capabilities on MacOSX systems.
Peter Wilson (interview completed 2006-11-08): Peter Wilson is the author of the well-known memoir class, has been involved with the development of several other
classes, and has worked extensively with fonts. In the photo he is
operating a Chandler & Price 1910 old style hand press and is in the
process of inserting a sheet of paper to print on the second side.
Joseph Wright (interview completed 2009-10-21): Joseph is a relatively new arrival to the world of TeX development, particularly working in
the area of improving LaTeX support for chemistry. He also is a member of the
LaTeX3 team.
The TeX Community Blog is
doing its own interview series. Originally Paulo Cereda did the
interviews, but others in the community later joined Paulo during the
interview sessions. They have a dedicated chatroom for interviewing
their members; anyone can visit the chatroom and submit questions to the
interviewee, and Paulo serves in an editorial role.
Missing Mimi,
Christina Thiele TUGboat, Vol.32 (2015), No.1, p.7.
About Alan J. Cain
Interview with Alan J. Cain,
conducted by Jim Hefferon, TUGboat, Vol.46 (2025), No.2. Cain's
major work is the book Form
& Number, and since the interview he has published the minos style file for it on
an as-is basis.
About Matthew Carter
Travels in TeX Land.
A compendium of all his works relating to TeX, including his column of
the same name written for The PracTeX Journal.
About John Warnock
Video of panel
discussion involving Knuth and all but one of the key Stanford graduate
students who helped him develop TeX, held at the TUG 2010
convention in San Francisco.
This Interview Corner was coordinated for many years by Dave Walden,
who spent a lifetime in computer R&D but who was a relative newcomer to
TeX and friends when he started doing these interviews in 2004. Dave was
a serious user of (La)TeX (see his TeX Land web
pages), but not a particularly expert user. He did these interviews in
hopes that other users of TeX will be interested in knowing more
about the evolution and use of TeX and friends, and the people behind them.
Interview subjects were chosen based on (a) seeking diversity
in many dimensions, (b) recommendations from people about who
should be interviewed, and (c) potential interview subjects being
willing to be interviewed.
Dave stepped down from the Interview Corner in 2021, and passed away in 2022. He always encouraged others to
participate in this and his other projects, and a new volunteer to
continue with the interviews would be welcome; please email interviews@tug.org.
