Hàn Thế Thành

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Hàn Thế Thành (* 1972 in Vietnam ) is a Vietnamese computer scientist and author of pdfTeX , an extension of the TeX typesetting program .

Note: The family name of this Vietnamese name is Hàn , in Western texts the spelling is often simplified Han . According to Vietnamese custom, the person should be referred to by their first name Thành - even in formal situations .

Life

Hàn Thế Thành went to Czechoslovakia in 1990 and studied there from 1991 to 2001 at Masaryk University in Brno .

When Thành wanted to write his master's thesis on automatic typesetting systems in 1994, Professor Jiří Zlatuška, a very active TeX user and developer, had the idea of ​​rewriting TeX as part of the work with the help of a declarative language such as Prolog and then using it for further development to use. However, it later became clear that this would have been too difficult and extensive a task for a single student, and Zlatuška changed the subject to The TeX System and the Portable Document Format . The goal was to change TeX so that it can generate PDF files directly. Zlatuška got this suggestion during discussions with Donald E. Knuth and Philip Taylor at Stanford University . The result was a preliminary operating version of pdfTeX, with which he obtained his master’s degree in computer science in 1996 .

When looking for a topic for his doctoral studies, which began in 1996, that should have something to do with typesetting again, his doctoral supervisor Jiří Zlatuška suggested adding microtypographic capabilities to the meanwhile further developed pdfTeX . When he submitted his dissertation Microtypographical Extensions to the TeX System , pdfTeX was fully operational. Thành, who earned his Ph.D. has made a contribution to basic research in digital typography with its newly introduced microtypographic features.

After completing his doctorate, Thành returned to Vietnam and worked at the University of Education in Ho Chi Minh City , where he taught introductory programming courses and worked as a network administrator.

Thành was instrumental in the development of VnTeX, a collection of macro and font packages that support the creation of documents in the Vietnamese language.

Hàn Thế Thành has lived in Bielefeld with his wife since 2006 .

Publications

  • Microtypographic extensions to the TeX typesetting system. (Dissertation at the Faculty of Computer Science, Masaryk University, Brno, October 2000), TUGboat, Volume 21 (2000), No. 4, pp. 317-434 , ISSN  0896-3207 .
  • The Joy of TeX2PDF - Acrobatics with an Alternative to DVI Format. (together with Petr Sojka, Jiří Zlatuška), TUGboat, Volume 17 (1996), No. 3, pp. 244-251 , ISSN  0896-3207 .
  • The pdfTEX user manual. (together with Sebastian Rahtz), TUGboat, Volume 18 (1997), No. 4, pp. 249-254 , ISSN  0896-3207 .
  • Improving TeX's Typeset Layout. TUGboat, Volume 19 (1998), No. 3, pp. 284-288 , ISSN  0896-3207 .
  • Margin Kerning and Font Expansion with pdfTeX. TUGboat, Volume 22 (2001), No. 3, pp. 146-148 , ISSN  0896-3207 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Jump up ↑ Trường Giang: LaTeX - Công cụ soạn thảo tài liệu khoa h .c. (LaTeX - An Editor for Scientific Documents), Người Lao Động, December 18, 2003.
  2. ↑ VnTeX - hỗ trợ tiếng Việt cho TeX . (VnTeX - Vietnamese language support for TeX) at SourceForge .
  3. ↑ VnTeX in the CTAN.
personal data
SURNAME Hàn Thế Thành
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Han The Thanh
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Vietnamese computer scientist
DATE OF BIRTH 1972
PLACE OF BIRTH Vietnam