Frank Mittelbach

Frank Mittelbach studied mathematics and computer science at the Johannes-Gutenberg University, Mainz. These days he is working for HP Enterprise Services in an architect role.

His interest in LaTeX and in the automated formatting of complex documents in general goes back to his university days and has become a major interest, perhaps a vocation. He is author or co-author of many and varied LaTeX extension packages, such as AmSLaTeX, doc, multicol, and NFSS: the New Font Selection Scheme.

At the TUG conference at Stanford University in 1989, he gave a talk about the problems with LaTeX 2.09, which led to his taking on the responsibility for the maintenance and further development of LaTeX. This effort is generally known as the LaTeX3 Project and in the capacity of technical director of this project, he has overseen the original major release of LaTeX2e in 1994 and the, by now, about 20 subsequent maintenance releases of this software.

His publication of many technical papers on LaTeX and on general research results in automated formatting brought him in contact with Peter Gordon from Addison-Wesley. Peter and Frank inaugurated the book series "Tools and Techniques for Computer Typesetting" (TTCT), with Frank as series editor. "The LaTeX Companion" (1994) was the first book of this series whose titles by now cover LaTeX in all its facets. Forthcoming works will expand that core to cover other typesetting and information processing tools and concepts.