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                         \kern-.04em T\kern-.08em U\kern-.08em G\egroup}
\providecommand{\DVI}{\acro{DVI}}
\providecommand{\SGML}{\acro{SGML}}
\providecommand{\WWW}{\acro{WWW}}
\providecommand{\PDF}{\acro{PDF}}
\providecommand{\PS}{\acro{PostScript}}
\providecommand{\DANTE}{\acro{DANTE}}
\providecommand{\NTG}{\acro{NTG}}
\providecommand{\UKTUG}{\acro{UKTUG}}
\begin{document}
\begin{center}
               The 17th Annual \TeX\ Users Group Meeting\\
                $\Pi\mathrm{O}\Lambda\Upsilon$\TeX\\
                   July 28 -- August 2, 1996\\
               A Travel Report
\end{center}

The rain had just stopped when the Lufthansa plane, which flew me from
Geneva to Moscow (via M\"unchen), touched down on Thursday July 25th
at about 5 p.m., on Moscow's international Airport Sheremetyevo. I
arrived at about the same time as Yannis Haralambous (from France) and
Robin Fairbairns and Sebastian Rahtz (from the United Kingdom). In the
arrival hall we were met by Barbara Beeton and Mimi Burbank, who
arrived already the day before from the United States, and Irina
Makhovaya, \CyrTUG's Executive Director. In no time we boarded a
minibus and we were on our way to Dubna, about 120 km more to the
north, where the TUG'96 Conference was due to start the next Sunday
morning. It was about eight o'clock when we arrived at the Hotel
``Dubna'', ideally situated close to a park on the banks of the
Volga River.

\section{Preparations and Board Business}

The next morning we were met by with Dr.\ Vladimir Korenkov, the
vice-Director of the Laboratory of Computing Techniques and Automation
(\acro{LCTA}), where TUG'96 was going to take place. He showed us the
conference facilities and the computer infrastructure connected to the
Internet.  Later that morning several of us were interviewed by the
local Dubna television station. After lunch we had the first session
of the \tug{} Board Meeting. The six Board members present in Dubna would
meet over the whole duration of the Conference to try and come up with
a business plan that would guarantee that \tug{} could function optimally
in the near future taking into account its limited financial
resources. I shall come back to the issues below when discussing the
Business Meeting on the Monday.

Saturday we continued the Board meeting the whole day, with a
brief interruption around 6 p.m.\ for attending a Welcome Party for
the participants to the Conference, most of whom arrived that
afternoon.\footnote{%
  TUG'96 was attended by 77 participants, 51 from Russia, and 26 from
  thirteen other nations.  We had one representative from Belgium,
  Canada, Hungary, Norway, Spain, and Sweden; two from the Czech
  Republic, France, and the United Kingdom; three from Germany and the
  Netherlands; four from Switzerland and the United States of
  America.}  
It was with great pleasure that we could greet old friends, whom we
had not met since last year's \tug{} or Euro\TeX{} Conferences or got to know 
new faces.

\section{The Conference starts}

The formal opening of the Conference took place the Sunday, at 12
o'clock in the Conference room on the top floor of the LCTA building.
The participants were welcomed by Dr.\ Vladimir Korenkov and Prof.\ 
Evgueniy Pankratiev (President of \CyrTUG). Then the scientific
Secretary of \acro{JINR} (the Joint Institute of Nuclear Research, of which
the \acro{LCTA} Lab is a part) gave an informative introduction about the
activities of \acro{JINR} as an international laboratory. It counts eighteen
member states and celebrated its 40th anniversary just a few months
earlier (\acro{LCTA} similarly celebrates its 30th anniversary this year).
Finally, it as my turn as \tug{} president to thank all participants for
coming to Dubna and to formally open the TUG'96 Conference.

The first presentation was by Irina Makhovaya, \CyrTUG's Executive
Director, who retraced the history of the use of \TeX{} in Russia,
and, in particular, the role of \CyrTUG{}. This first morning session
was closed by Yannis Haralambous (France) who showed the relation
between ligatures in high quality typography for Latin-based alphabets
and Arabic calligraphy.  He presented his Al-Amal system for Arabic
typesetting. It uses fonts built with \MF{} to benefit maximally from
\MF's optical scaling capabilities and covers the complete Arabic
character set of Unicode.

Just before lunch in the Institute's canteen the photographer 
took a group picture of all participants in front of the LCTA
building. 

We started again around one hour later with two presentations about
problems related of Cyrillic encodings and font sets. First, Serguey
and Ludmila Znamenskiy showed how the many incompatible Cyrillic
language encodings pose severe problems on computer networks for the
exchange of (\TeX) files. In the framework of the ``Russian \TeX{}''
Project a new font family (called ``RF'', for ``Russian Font'') and
associated tools were developed to allow more natural and simpler
typesetting in over sixty Cyrillic-based languages written in the
Russian Federation.  The next speaker, Olga Lapko, described the
LHFONTS package, whose main aim was to make available Cyrillic letters
as extensions of the standard Computer Modern fonts, but taking
Russian typographic traditions into account.. Together with the $\Omega$
Project a set of well over 256 characters were created to cover the
Cyrillic part of the Unicode table. Several characters which are not
included in Unicode have also been drawn. All these characters are
available in two 256-character font sets, with the different encodings
and ligatures handled by special header files, which are generated by
a \TeX{} job following user's instructions.

After the coffee break Karel P\'\i\v ska gave a list of over fifty
languages written with the Cyrillic alphabet. He discussed how the
many encodings, which are mostly based on the Russian language, are
not always convenient to code the many different glyphs needed to
write these languages. In collaboration with Olga Lapko of \CyrTUG{}
Karel proposed a possible layout for an 8-bit ``Modern Cyrillic''
Computer Modern Roman \TeX{} font. The next speaker J\"org Knappen,
presented two papers. He started with his own work on the latest
version (1.3) of the DC fonts. J\"org emphasized that this version is
a (hopefully) last step towards stability and completeness, and will
culminate in the release of version 1.0 of the EC fonts.  Then he
introduced us to the nice work of Fukui Rei, who was unable to attend
the Conference himself. Fukui Rei has developed a package for
processing IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) symbols. His TIPA
(\TeX{} IPA, or Tokyo IPA!) package is fully \LaTeXe{}-compatible and
defines \LaTeX's T3 encoding, for which is provides full support.
Amongst it many features let me mention that it offers the 256 symbols
in several font styles, has extended macros for handling accents,
diacritics, tone letters, easy input of phonetic symbols, and the
possibility to draw vowel diagrams.

The day ended splendidly with a joyful Welcome Party, with a lot of
good food, Russian Vodka and excellent wines, plus numerous
good-humoured toasts (little improvised speeches given by most
participants), and not-so-Russian dances. The sun was already setting
(it was well after ten, Dubna lies at a latitude of $56^{\circ}$ North)
when we started leaving the Institute's Canteen, where the Party
was organized, for our 15-minute walk back to our hotel.

\section{Monday July 29th}

The Monday morning session started with a report by Yannis Haralambous
on the progress made in the $\Omega$ project and in particular the
$\mathrm{\Omega Times}$ and $\mathrm{\Omega Helvetica}$ fonts.  These
fonts will be a publicly available virtual Times and Helvetica-like
font set, based upon real \PS{} fonts. When finished, the
$\Omega$ fonts will be a superset of the alphabetic part of the
Unicode code set, including supplementary glyphs, like ligatures, for
producing output of the highest typographic quality. 

Richard Kinch's presentation continued on the subject of Unicode.  He
talked about his True\TeX{} system, which extends \TeX{} and its
associated tools to embrace the 16-bit Unicode encoding standard. In
particular, he explained how he implemented the extensions on a PC
using the Windows Graphics Device Interface and TrueType scalable font
technology.

The next two talks were delivered by Alexander Berdnikov. The
first one was about how the parameterization of the Computer Modern
fonts can be used to generate Multiple Master instances of the CM
typefaces.  He described his \texttt{mff.sty} package, which allows
one to specify new fonts dynamically from inside a \LaTeX{}
document. Various parameters such as weight, width, height, and
contrast can be specified and \MF{} code will be generated to
represent the chosen typeface. Alexander showed the outcome of some
interesting experiments with variations of these parameters. Then he
went on the talk about recent work on his VFComb program that facilitates
virtual font management.  It assembles ligature tables and metric
information from various fonts and combines it with user-defined
metric, ligature and kerning data. In particular, is deals gracefully
with non-Latin fonts, where the characters must be composed from
elements from different physical fonts.

The morning session on encodings was closed by Peter Ovchenkov, who
discussed the problems with moving Cyrillic text files between
operating systems. The present situation is quite complex since many
encodings for Russian coexist, as do almost as many different \TeX{}
fonts. In general, it is not too difficult to translate text files
from one encoding to another, but problems arise when dealing with
\DVI{} files and fonts.  To get around these problems Peter proposed
to adopt a standard font encoding, and an identical \TeX{} internal
encoding. Then the only system-dependent part remains the
transformation from the input to \TeX's internal representation (this
can be achieved, for instance, by using em\TeX's Code Page mechanism,
or by applying a patch to the CWEB code on \UNIX).

After lunch, Dag Langmyhr presented his Star\-\TeX{} system, which is
a new \TeX{} format specially developed for non-expert users of \TeX,
such as students and administrative staff. Robustness and simplicity
are the main goals, with special attention being paid to the handling
of error messages. Commands are specified between angular brackets (\`a la
\HTML), thus making it trivial to hide \TeX{} commands and the
behaviour of \TeX's ten special characters from the user. This offers
a more intuitive and less error-prone system, yet at the same time
retains the typographic quality of the output (since \TeX{} is the
underlying processing engine). For this innovative work Dag got a
price as one of the most innovative articles.

Gabriel Valiente Feruglio presented a list of journals which accept
papers marked up in \LaTeX. He emphasized that the possibility for
scientists and students to submit texts in \LaTeX{} is important for
the survival of \LaTeX{} in the academic world. Gabriel gave a clear
overview of the pros and cons of submitting material in \LaTeX{}.  He
mentioned faster delivery, reduced proof-reading leading to a shorter
publication cycle, with higher control over the final layout and
increased availability as positive points, while the rather huge
investment in learning the \LaTeX{} language and running the paper
correctly, with all external picture files, packages, etc.\ was
considered as a drawback.  He concluded with a discussion of some of
the common problems encountered in the publication process. He hoped
that, one day, a generic approach will be available, with different
journal layouts merely being options of a general ``publisher'' class
file, without the author having to introduce changes in the source.

Denis Leinartas and Serguey Znamenskiy described a new \TeX{} shell
for DOS, based on em\TeX. It is more general than previous shells in
that it one can manage supplementary programs like \texttt{mfpic},
\texttt{bm2font}, to run with several configuration files
simultaneously, in order to control the target directory of temporary
files, etc.

Mikhail Grinchuk gave an introduction to how the Russian typographic
traditions can be dealt with in \TeX. In particular some peculiarities
of mathematics typesetting, like repeating operators or relational
signs after a line break need special attention.

\section{\tug{} Business Meeting}

After a short break, I invited the members of the recently elected \tug{}
Executive Committee to come and join me at the front for opening the
\tug{} Business Meeting. I started by thanking the outgoing Board
Members, Peter Flynn, former \tug{} Secretary, Michael Ferguson, former
President of \tug{}'s Technical Council, for their many years of
dedicated work, and Mimi Jett, Tomas Rokicki and Norman Walsh for
their contributions to \tug{} and the \TeX{} Community.  I expressed the
hope that they would be able, in the future, to continue to contribute
to the life of the \TeX{} community. Then I welcomed Mimi Burbank, who
was re-elected as a Board member for three years. The other
(remaining) Board members are Barbara Beeton, Karl Berry, Robin
Fairbairns (Chair of \UKTUG{}, co-opted for one year), George Greenwade,
Yannis Haralambous, Judy Johnson, Sebastian Rahtz, Jon Radel, and
Ji\v{r}\'{\i} Zlatu\v{s}ka.  The Board re-appointed Sebastian Rahtz as
Secretary, and appointed Mimi Burbank as Treasurer, and Yannis
Haralambous as vice President.  Since Michael Ferguson is no longer a
Board Member, Sebastian Rahtz was appointed Chair of the Technical
Council. To fill the vacancy in the Technical Council, it was
suggested to have Alan Hoenig, well-known for his many interesting
articles in \TUB{}, serve on it; therefore shortly after the meeting
I appointed Alan Hoenig to the Board.

At the last \tug{} Business Meeting in St. Petersburg in Florida in 1995,
I stated that I considered that our main task was to get \TUB{} back
on schedule. Thanks to the hard work of the \TUB{} production team
(Barbara Beeton, \TUB{} editor, Mimi Burbank, Team Coordinator, and
Robin Fairbairns, Sebastian Rahtz, Christina Thiele and myself), with
help from Malcolm Clark and Wietse Dol for some issues, we were able
to produce four issues of our journal before Christmas 1995, and
caught up with the normal production schedule before Easter of his
year. Moreover, thanks especially to Mimi and Christina, we were able,
for the first time, to print and distribute the Proceedings of the \tug{}
Conference at the same time as the Conference itself, so that all \tug{}
members can profit from the information presented at that meeting even
though they could not attend.  We have had to make some compromises to
meet the production schedule, and for reasons of cost we have to limit
ourselves to 96 pages per issue (paper cost has recently gone up by
over 10\%, domestic postage by about the same amount, while overseas
postage rates has increased by about 30\%!). We have folded TTN
(\emph{\tug{} and \TeX{} News}) back into \TUB{}, so that the
information in \TUB{} will contain a fair balance between news items,
introductory, tutorial-level and more technically advanced articles.

Since last summer we have seen the success of the TDS (\TeX{}
Directory Structure) standard, which was adopted by most web2c
distributions.  The \emph{\TeX{} Live} CD-ROM has been published (as a
collaboration between Thomas Esser, author of teTeX, GUTenberg, \tug{},
and \UKTUG{}). It offers a plug-and-play \TeX{} system for \UNIX-based
operating systems, and is built using the TDS layout. 
\tug{} and \UKTUG{} published the Edmac Manual.

To benefit maximally from the Internet, \tug{} now has its own server
donated by Karl Berry and connected at UMB (University of
Massachusetts of Boston).  From that node we run a set of mailing
lists (thanks to Peter Flynn who, until recently and for many years,
looked after those lists on his computer in Cork, Ireland), a
(limited) ftp service, and a \WWW{} server. We hope to develop especially
the \WWW{} service \texttt{www.tug.org} in the near future in order to
provide a unique entry-point for all \TeX{} and \tug{}-related
information.  As many (especially N. American) \TeX{} users will have
experienced, the \acro{SHSU} \CTAN{} node is no longer maintained, and
so is severely out-of-date and unusable for all practical purposes.
\DANTE{} has pledged the donation of a Sparc station which presently
supports the \DANTE{} \CTAN{} server in Heidelberg, which will be
upgraded by a bigger machine. Once the promised machine is installed
at \acro{UMB}, Karl Berry and the \CTAN{} maintainers will try to set
up as fast as possible this long overdue replacement of a
fully-supported \CTAN{} node in North America. Our sincerest thanks go
to \DANTE{} for this generous offer.

Recently, some illegally-changed Computer Modern font files were found
to be present in some \TeX{} distributions and on some public server
sites.  \tug{} strongly deplores the maintenance of out-of-date and
corrupt data on publicly available resources and urges the maintainers
to destroy the files in question as fast as possible.  The Technical
Council will look into the possibility of providing checking
procedures to validate distributions in the future.

In order to have all \TeX{} users in the world benefit from the
articles in \TUB{}, the Board decided to make all \TUB{}s articles
older then one year freely available electronically as fast as
copyright clearance can be obtained from the various
authors. Moreover, the most recent issues will be made available to
other \TeX{} User Groups as \PDF{} files as soon as they are printed, and
the User Groups can distribute electronic copies to their respective
members (\emph{only}).

Coming back to TUG'96, it is with great pleasure that I could
acknowledge donations to the Bursary Fund by GUTenberg, \NTG{},
\UKTUG{}, and \tug{} itself and a contribution in kind from
\DANTE{}.  Also continued joint membership agreements with
\NTG{} and \UKTUG{} are without doubt appreciated by people in
the United Kingdom and the Netherlands, since it is a more economical
and simpler than separate memberships.

On the less positive side I had to mention that, notwithstanding a
re-subscription campaign with members of the three previous years via
email, membership numbers now stand at about 1500 (about half from
North America), down again from last year's figures by about 15\%.
The increased cost of producing \TUB{}, and the fixed cost of the \tug{}
Office probably will lead to a deficit of about \$20,000 for 1996.
This means that drastic actions have to be taken to make sure that \tug{}
can survive in the medium term, and various options have been
considered for implementation early next year. Amongst these the
reduction of the Office staff to a half-time equivalent, and more
reliance on email and \WWW{} services will be introduced at the beginning
of 1997, while other measures, still under discussion, are due to take
effect by the summer of 1997. I hope that \tug{} will be able to count on
your continued support to make this transition as smooth as possible,
and that the financial situation will grow better and allow us to buy
some equipment to develop the Internet services which we plan to offer
soon.

At the end of the meeting some suggestions were made as to how \tug{}
could guarantee the quality of \TeX{} software, but lack of resources
does not make this a viable possibility at present. Also, a more
active role of the Technical Council in the development and the
recognition of ``\tug{} standards'' was called for, and I am sure that
the members of the TC will do their best to contribute in this area.
As an answer to another question I had to admit that at the time of
the Conference (and of this writing, late August) no definitive venue
for the TUG'97 Conference has been chosen by lack of firm proposals.
\tug{} still hopes that an attractive conference site can be found,
with a local organizer who can give us a reasonable guarantee that
TUG'97 will be a success.\fbox{TO BE CHANGED IF WE CHOOSE SF}.

After dinner we all took a pleasant walk back to the hotel on that
warm summer evening, with several of us deciding to have a
\emph{Baltica} beer and discuss \TeX{} or other business watching the
sunset on the Volga.

\section{Tuesday July 30th}

The Tuesday morning session had to be quite short since we had an
excursion planned to the Russian religious center of Sergiev Posad,
one and a half hour away by bus. So we started off by listening to
Laurent Siebenmann, who made a plea for using \DVI{} files as an
efficient exchange format for publishing scientific papers. To attain
that aim Laurent proposed that a small set of ``atomic'' supplementary
characters, coping with Latin-alphabet based European languages be
defined to complement Knuth's CM fonts, which are supposed to be
available wherever \TeX{} is installed. For graphics inclusion he
explained the notion of ``multi-standard'' graphics object and how
``special'' commands can be rendered on a given platform by a utility
translating a general (to be defined) syntax for special commands into
the native format for the given platform.

Serguey Strelkov then talked about the automatic preparation of
indexes for the journal of abstracts \emph{Mathematics}. The
bibliographic database and text files with the abstracts are encoded
in Russian. First, \LaTeX{} is called to make a raw index. Then a perl
script is run to include some relevant information in the file. Next
\texttt{DviSpell}, a table-driven program, transforms the \DVI{} file
into a text file, and generates sort keys. Finally, MakeIndex and
another perl program are run and include the text of the abstract
inside the sorted index file.

After an early lunch we all took the bus to Sergiev Posad, where a
local guide introduced us to the history of the churches and other
buildings of this cen\-tu\-ries-old centre of the Russian Orthodox
Church. Most Orthodox priests come and study in the modern seminary.
We visited the well-furnished museum documenting the history of
Russian Church matters.  On our way back our bus had a flat front
tire, and this (unforeseen) event gave us the opportunity to spend a
supplementary hour or two in a small Russian village in the
countryside. As we arrived back in Dubna too late to go to the
Canteen, we all had a pleasant picnic on the lawn in front of our
hotel.  We just had enough time to finish dinner before a fierce
thunderstorm forced everybody to take cover, so that we all ended up
spending the evening inside the hotel watching the lightning dress the
evening sky in all kinds of lovely colors.

\section{Wednesday July 31th}

The Wednesday morning started with two talks by Kees van der Laan.  He
first explained how natural and easy it is to handle drawing with
\TeX{} only using Papert's Turtle Graphics paradigm. In this approach
all coordinates are expressed by specifying directions as points on
the compass. Kees' second talk was also very ``visual''. He shared his
enthusiasm about his first steps in \MF{} to create graphics for
inclusion in \TeX{} documents. He also considered \MP{} and \PS{}
and he discussed how they allow multi-dimensional objects to be
represented in a convenient way.. As a conclusion, he stated that \MP{}
combines the best of the \MF{} and \PS{} worlds, and, as Knuth
himself expressed at TUG'95, Kees feels that this tool has been
under-used in the \TeX{} community.

The next two presentations discussed how \TeX{} could be better and
more directly integrated with Adobe's Portable Document Format (\PDF),
an optimized form of \PS{} for the world of hypertext and the
Internet. Serguey Lesenko talked about his \texttt{dvi2pdf} program,
based on Tom Rokicki's \texttt{dvips}. It generates \PDF{} directly,
rather than indirectly via the \PS{} route. Petr Sojka, and his
\texttt{tex2pdf} program take a different approach by modifying the
\TeX{} program itself, so that it can generate \PDF{} code directly.
However, to take maximal advantage of these developments, it was
suggested that a standard interface for hypertext on the \TeX{} level
should be agreed as fast as possible. This would increase the
attractiveness of using \LaTeX{} as a markup language for documents,
combining the typographic quality of the \TeX{} formatter with the
hypertext facilities of \PDF{} or \HTML{} via translation programs.

After lunch we were taken on an outing to Kimry, a town a few
kilometers downstream on the Volga, where we visited a rich museum
documenting the historical development of the region. On the way we
had also the occasion to see the point where the Moscow-Volga Canal
joins the Volga, as well as the southern banks of the huge artificial
Moscow Sea (Lake), which was created in the nineteen thirties to serve
as a water reservoir for the Moscow region, and is now a first-choice
holiday resort with sailing and hiking very popular. We also saw many
datchas, old and new, where town dwellers spend their summer holidays,
most of the time working in the garden to grow vegetables and fruits
for the long Russian winter.

\section{Thursday August 1st}

The Wednesday was the only day where we had rain for the larger part of
the day, but already the next morning the sun had come back for the
last ``working'' day of the Conference. Slephuphin was the first
speaker, and he addressed some issues about methods needed for
successful multi-lingual text processing.  Then I gave an overview of
tools to go from \LaTeX{} to \HTML{} or the reverse. I discussed in
particular recent developments of the \texttt{latex2html} processor,
especially how large documents can be treated by segmentation. For
going from \HTML{} to \LaTeX{} there now exist two programs, \texttt{gf},
which uses the \texttt{nsgmls} \SGML{} parser, and \texttt{htmls2latex},
which allows one to combine several \HTML{} files into a single \LaTeX{}
source file. Moreover, the latter program lets you embed instructions
to guide the translation process in the \HTML{} source.  Another
interesting development which I mentioned is the \texttt{idvi}
program, which is a \DVI-viewer implemented in the Java-language.  This
means that it allows \DVI-files to be viewed with any Web browser which
supports the Java language. One drawback is its slow speed, since the
Java language gets all its resources (fonts, etc.) from the remote
host and cannot rely on anything on the local machine. It is hoped
that extensions to the Java language will allow a way to indicate
which resources are available locally, so that rendering speeds could
be drastically improved.

After the break Andrey Astrelin presented his ideas on a C++ library
for handling graphics objects and how to use them to insert graphics
in \TeX{} files.  Then Alexander Berdnikov showed his work on the
\texttt{pmgraph} package, which extends \LaTeX's \texttt{picture}
environment, for instance in the area of offering a more complete set
of vectors, circular arcs, extended frames, and calculating
automatically the size of the picture with respect to the width of the
text. In the next talk Kees van der Laan reviewed the history and
explained the basic philosophy of his \acro{BLUE} Format. It is built
upon Knuth's \texttt{manmac}, the \TUB{} macros and some \acro{AMS}
styles.  It can be used stand-alone, and is a perfect tool for authors
to create, format, exchange, and maintain compuscripts. A converter
blue-2-\LaTeX{} is also available. As the last talk of the morning
Youri Ivanov gave a short overview of the \TeX{} setup at the
Institute in Dubna.

\section{The Conference ends}

Then came the moment to formally close TUG'96. I once more thanked all
those who attended, and hoped that they enjoyed the presentations, as
much as I did, and that they used the opportunity to discuss
personally points of interest with the other participants.  Sebastian
Rahtz then awarded \UKTUG{}'s prize in memory of Cathy Booth to
Petr Sojka and Han The Thanh, for their paper on \TeX\ to \PDF{} which
had been chosen by the audience as the work that might influence their
future work most. I awarded a \tug{} prize to Dag Langmyhr for his
innovative work on a generic \SGML/\HTML{} approach to make \TeX{}
easier to use for novices and students.  Then I thanked \acro{JINR}
and \CyrTUG{} for their extreme efficiency in organizing this year's
\tug{} Conference, and all Russian collaborators for their
hospitality. I am sure that all those present will never forget the
human warmth and true friendship that was present all along the
Conference.

During the afternoon the whole company went on a boat trip on the
Volga (we sailed down to Kimry, the town we visited the previous day
by bus), and we enjoyed the splendor of the banks of the Volga in a
bright sunshine. Around six o'clock we got off the Boat in Ratmino,
where the Dubna River flows into the Volga. There we were invited to a
farewell picnic, with all the good food, wine and, of course, Vodka,
we had come to appreciate during the past week. It was the last time
we were all together, since the next day, Friday, most participants
would return home. Many a Russian song was sung, a few participants
took a refreshing dive in the warm waters of the Dubna River, while
others just chatted, enjoying each other's company, hoping it would
never end. Just before sunset, we all boarded the boat again, and were
taken back to the park in front of the hotel.

\section{Saying Goodbye}

We all had to be ready at eight o'clock the next morning to take the
bus for Moscow. So, there we all stood, luggage packed, and saying
goodbye to all those staying behind in Dubna or returning by car or
train to Moscow (or elsewhere).  It was already well past nine when we
left the little town of Dubna where we had been staying for the past
week and headed for the Capital of Russia. 

Our first stop was at Moscow International airport, to drop off a few
participants who were leaving Moscow in the early afternoon. Then we
continued to the center of Town where an English speaking guide
boarded our bus. She took us on a four-hour tour of Moscow, with a
visit to Red Square, a ride through the central areas of town, which
are being restored for the 850th anniversary of the foundation of the
city next year. In particular, the big cathedral of Christ Savior,
destroyed by Stalin in the thirties, is being completely rebuilt, and
will soon once again be one of the major attractions of Moscow.  We
also were taken up the Lenin Hills, from where we could admire the
great panoramic view on the city, with the golden ``bulbs'' of the
Kremlin churches, the Christ Savior Cathedral, plus a few other
re-built churches glowing in the sunshine some ten kilometers away.
On our ride back to the center, we stopped once more at the memorial
and museum of the 50th anniversary of the end of the Great Patriotic
War (Second World War), situated on the hill where Napoleon entered
the city in September 1812.

And that was the end of the visit and also the final episode of
TUG'96, since between the monument and the city center the bus stopped
a few more times to let participants get off. Often with (hidden)
tears in the eyes we said goodbye to each other, promising to keep in
touch, and hoping to see each other soon at TUG'97 or wherever our
lifelines meet again.
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