As part of its efforts to bridge the digital divide, TeX Users Group (TUG) has decided to tackle the geographical divide. For the first time, the annual meeting of the TUG is to be held at a venue outside Europe or North America. The 23rd annual conference of this free software users association will be held in Thiruvananthapuram Technopark this week, Mr Dominik Wujastyk, Director, Welcom Centre of Medicine, University College, London told a press conference, here. Mr Wujastyk, a Sanskrit scholar and a member of the programme committee of TUG-2000 said the three-day meet starting September 4 will be chaired by Mr Sebastian Rahtz, Information Manager, Oxford University Computing Services. The conference will have 32 delegates from Australia, Canada, China, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Hungary, Iran, the Netherlands, the UK and the USA. There will be 32 Indian delegates too. In India, TeX is widely used in institutions like the IITs, the Indian Institute of Science, Saha Institute of Theoretical Physics, and the Indian Statistical Institute. In Thiruvananthapuram, the Centre for Mathematical Sciences has long used TeX, as has Focal Image Pvt Ltd, an Indo-UK joint venture that has been using TeX for over a decade to run a profitable text processing venture. Mr Satheesh Babu, chairperson of the TUG-2002 organising committee said the meet would give a fillip to the wider utilisation of TeX in India. The organisers of the meet in India are Indian TeX Users Group, department of IT of the Kerala government and Thiruvananthapuram Technopark. The conference will be preceded by three days of tutorials, said Dr Srivatsan, Director, IIITM-K (Indian Insitute of Information Technology and Management, Kerala). Around 22 Indians have registered for the tutorials. Apart from the more specialized talks devoted to technical aspects of TeX, TUG 2002 will feature talks on typesetting traditions in India, an overview of TeX usage in India, an Indian perspective of new horizons in free software, fonts and packages to typeset Bengali script using TeX, and typesetting in Hindi, Sanskrit and Persian. TeX (derived from the Greek letters “tau”, “epsilon” and “chi” and pronounced “tech”, also alludes to “techne”, the Greek root meaning art as well as technology) is a computer program written and designed by famed computer scientist Donald Ervin Knuth of Stanford University for preparing publishable documents, especially those of a technical or mathematical nature. TUG, the TeX Users Group, is an international association of individual and institutional members who promote TeX, and discuss issues and problems related to TeX, principally through TUGboat, the quarterly publication of TUG.