Hans Hagen

Hans Hagen (born on October 31, 1958) is the main developer of ConTeXt, a freely available macro package for the TeX typesetting system, and the owner of a company PRAGMA Advanced Document Engineering (Pragma ADE ) in Netherlands. The company is specialized in high quality automated typesetting of documents and the source code developed by Hans for their projects is being published as open source in ConTeXt on a daily basis.
He spends the majority of his free time supporting the community by regularly answering emails, resolving bugs, implementing new feature requests and regularly presenting his work on TeX conferences and metings (TUG meetings, BachoTeX, Dante meetings, NTG meetings) and magazines (TUGboat, MAPS, Die TeXnische Komödie). His talks are mostly known for diverse style and presenting features that everyone believed were impossible to do with TeX.
He started developing a new TeX-based system in nineties out of a need for a more flexible system than LaTeX and first released it into public in 1996. He was also involved in the New Typesetting System project, a reimplementation of TeX. Approximately ten years later he started playing with idea of integrating Lua as a powerful programming language into TeX to simplify programming and add more power into the engine. Together with Hartmut Henkel and Taco Hoekwater they gave birth to a new LuaTeX engine that supported UTF-8 native encoding, non-latin scripts and OpenType fonts. This has been the second TeX engine after XeTeX with proper internalization. In tight cooperation with LuaTeX development he has rewritten the whole ConTeXt system and made the first public release of ConTeXt MK IV (mark four) on August 6th, 2007.
Between 2001 and 2008 he has been the president of the Dutch language oriented TeX users group (NTG) that was sponsoring development of LuaTeX, MetaPost, MPlib as well as font projects such as Latin Modern and TeX Gyre.

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