Michel Goossens is at present responsible for scientific text processing at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, in Geneva, Switzerland. He is a coauthor of The LaTeX Companion, Second Edition, The LaTeX Graphics Companion, Second Edition, and The LaTeX Web Companion, and also is a past president of the TUG and GUTenberg TeX Users Groups.
Michel began working at CERN after earning a Ph.D. in physics at Brussels University. At CERN, he soon realized the importance of good documentation and, since the middle 1980s, has been deeply involved with LaTeX. At the same time he has followed closely the development of other generic markup languages and was among the first users of SGML, HTML (invented at CERN), and later XML.
Frank Mittelbach is manager and technical director of the LaTeX3 Project, in which capacity he oversaw the release of LaTeX 2e and more than 15 subsequent releases of this software. In 1989 he joined Electronic Data Systems (EDS), working in a newly formed group for document processing using TeX and other tools. In his current position, he is responsible for concepts and implementation for remote monitoring and management of distributed systems and networks. Frank is a coauthor of The LaTeX Companion, Second Edition, and The LaTeX Graphics Companion, Second Edition, as well as the editor of the book series in which they appear, Tools and Techniques for Computer Typesetting.
Frank studied mathematics and computer science at the Johannes-Gutenberg University, Mainz. His interest in the automated formatting of complex documents in general, and in LaTeX in particular, goes back to his university days and has become a major interest, perhaps a vocation, and certainly it is now his "second job." He is author or coauthor of many and varied LaTeX extension packages, such as AMS-LaTeX, doc, multicol, and NFSS: the New Font Selection Scheme. In 1990 Frank presented the paper E-TeX: Guidelines for further TeX extensions, which explained the most critical shortcomings of TeX and argued the need for its further development and for research into the many open questions of automated typesetting. This was the first time the topic of change or extension had been openly discussed within the TeX community and, after getting some early opposition, it helped to spawn several important projects, such as eTEX, Omega, and NTS. He is now interested in bringing together the fruits of these TeX extension developments to get a stable, well-maintained, and widely available successor of TeX on which a future LaTeX3 can be based.
Sebastian Rahtz is information manager for Oxford University Computing Services. He is a coauthor of The LaTeX Graphics Companion, Second Edition, and The LaTeX Web Companion.
Sebastian started life in classics, moved to archaeology, and thence to computing. During the 1980s he taught humanities and archaeological computing at Southampton University, where he also came across TeX. The infection grew strong, and he spent most of the 1990s in TeX-related matters, working latterly for Elsevier Science in production support and in LaTeX to SGML conversion. During that time he was heavily involved in the international and UK TeX Users Groups in many capacities, and worked on a variety of LaTeX packages, most notably hyperref. His allegiance today has largely moved to XML, in which capacity he is Oxford's representative on the Board of the Text Encoding Initiative, but he retains a soft spot for the funny backslash and curly bracket language.
Denis Roegel is associate professor in computer science at the University of Nancy. He has been involved in LaTeX for the past 15 years and has a special interest in technical graphics.
Denis discovered computers in the early 1980s, and after studying mathematics and physics, he earned an engineering degree from the École Supérieure d'Électricité and a Ph.D. in computer science from the Université Henri Poincaré in Nancy. He later was a postdoctoral fellow at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.
Herbert Voß is a teacher of mathematics, physics and computer science at a German high school and a lecturer at the Free University of Berlin. For the past three years, he has been heavily involved in maintaining PSTricks and using PostScript from within LaTeX.
Herbert studied Electrical Engineering and Power Electronics in Hannover and Berlin. His first experience with a computer was in 1970 with an IBM machine and Algol60. The first text-processing program he used, in 1982, was Wordstar on a microcomputer with an 8080 chip. From this time on, he also was heavily involved in programming for various projects with Turbo Pascal. He came back to PostScript and LaTeX at the end of the 90s.