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I was born in 1951 Belgium in Hoeilaart, a village about 15 km to the south-east of Brussels. After primary school in Hoeilaart I got my secondary education in a state school in Brussels. From 1968 to 1972 I studied physics at the Free University of Brussels (Flemish part), and then spent six years at the same university working on a PhD on the physics of low-energy kaons using photos from the 1.5 meter bubble chamber of the Rutherford High Energy Laboratory (UK).
After finishing my PhD, I joined CERN at the beginning of 1979. I worked two years as a Fellow in the Experimental Physics Division on the BCDMS (NA4) Muon experiment, and then moved to software support first in the same division working on the GEM project with Emilio Pagiola, and then in the Informatics Technologies (IT, formerly DD and CN) Division. My first involvement here was with the ZEBRA system, working with Julius Zoll and René Brun. But soon I came to realize the importance of good and up-to-date documentation, and thus I became gradually more involved in the field of text processing and documentation. I thus sepnt the larger part of my career developing tools and providing support in the area of scientific document handling.
Since 1 January 2011 I am the President of the CERN Staff Association, which has the statutary role to establish the relations between the Organization's staff and senior management. In fact this is the second time I have the honour to occupy this function, since from July 2002 until the end of 2004 I already was elected vice-President and then President.
In the intervening six years I continued to work a large fraction of my time with the Staff Association, two years (2005 and 2006) as chair of the internal Commission of employment conditions, then two years (2007 and 2008) as Vice-President of Gianni Deroma, and finally two years (2009 and 2010) as Secretary and member of the Executive Committee.
In parallel with my activities in the Staff Association, during the period 2005 to 2010 I was responsible for scientific text processing (strategies, production, tools, support), ran CERN's PrintShop facilities and helped define a global site-wide printing policy for CERN.
In the area of Scientific Text Processing (STP) in the Collaboration and Information Services (CIS) Group in the Information Technology (IT) Department my task included helping authors go in an optimal way through the various stages of producing high-quality scientific documents (copy-editing, corrections, production of PDF, printing).
To keep up-to-date with the latest in scientific text processing I
attended the TUG2009 (31 August-4 September 2009 in Delft, The
Netherlands, TUG2009 Web
site) and TUG2008 conferences (24-28 July 2008 in Cork, Ireland,
TUG2008 Web site, multimedia
recordings of presentations). In July 2006 I attended the XSL
classes at the XML Summer School, Oxford University (UK). My trip
report is here. I also gave two talks (in
French) at the Journée GUTenberg
in Paris: Fonts et LaTeX (October 2006) and Unicode, OpenType et XeTeX (October 2007).
As part of my STP work I regularly install TeXlive, a distribution of TeX-related programs and files which is produced by a collaboration of TeX user groups from all over the world. I made the latest installment, TeXlive 2012, available on CERN's central computer platforms in July 2012. More information is here.
The first step in the successful introduction of new tools is providing adequate support and training. To help users benefit from the LaTeX tools, together with Frank Mittelbach and Alexander Samarin in 1994 I authored The LaTeX Companion. Ten years later, The LaTeX Companion (Second edition, 2004) was published. It is a completely up-to-date description of over 200 packages using nearly 1,000 fully tested examples in over 1100 pages. It shows how LaTeX can be extended to typeset all types of publications--from memos to encyclopedias, from complex scientific papers to poetry in most of the world's languages. See the LaTeX Project site for extracts from the book (e.g., the table of contents, the tables of figures and tables, the preface, the full text of chapter 3 (basic formatting tools), the bibliography and the full 100 page index.
In 1997 together with Sebastian Rahtz and Frank Mittelbach I finished another book The LaTeX Graphics Companion which is a complement to the first book in the area of graphics and the use of PostScript. A much augmented Second edition with the added expertise of two further co-authors Denis Roegel, Herbert Voß was published in July 2007. Some supplementary free material is available here.
In May 1999 The LaTeX Web Companion, a book I wrote together with Sebastian Rahtz, was published. In over 500 pages we describe the relation of LaTeX to Web languages, such as HTML and XML drawing on an example from HEP. An up-to-date version of Section 7.6 discussing XSLT (XML transformation language) can be found here.
These three books are available from Amazon (The LaTeX Companion (Second Edition, 2004), The LaTeX Graphics Companion (Second Edition, 2007), and The LaTeX Web Companion (1999). They have been translated in French, German, Russian and Japanese.
A little more in the past, before I got heavily involved in the activities in the Staff Association in July 2002, I worked for many years with several typesetting systems, like IBM's Script and BookMaster, MS-Word, PageMaker and Quark-Xpress, Unix's nroff, VAX's Document, and, more recently mainly LaTeX and HTML/SGML/XML. As a scientific institute, a large fraction of the thousands of physicists and engineers working at CERN use LaTeX for publishing their papers or for writing their documentation. Since about 1995 I have been working on developing tools related to TeX, especially, LaTeX. More in particular I was responsible for the coordination of the generation of all IT-API Group (now defunct) documents in various formats, in particular PostScript and HTML.
It is generally accepted that XML (Extensible Markup Language) has become an important component of information handling, in particular for documentation. Thus, since the beginning of 2000 I have been working on a EU-funded project TIPS (Tools for Innovative Publishing in Science). More information on TIPS and the first implementation of a portal, TORII can be found in Torii, an Open Portal over Open Archives by Sara Bertocco. There are also the papers presented at the Workshop on Personalization Techniques in Electronic Publishing on the Web: Trends and Perspectives, which was held on 28 May 2002 in Malaga, Spain, where TIPS had also its final review workshop., which had its final review meeting in Malaga (Spain) on 28-29 of May 2002. In that project I was responsible for studying ways of how XML tools can be optimally integrated in the framework of handling electronic information efficiently, especially for scientific documents. Some conclusions are available in my final report An XML Web strategy for scientific documents (PDF, 1.85 Mbytes)). Part of the work we did at CERN is also described in SVG, LaTeX and fonts.
Because of my activities in the international CERN environment I became interested in the general and particular needs of the various TeX user communities. From June 1994 to May 1999 I was President of GUTenberg, the French speaking TeX User's Group. I also was Vice-President (July 1994-July 1995) and then President (July 1995-July 1997) of TUG, the International TeX User Group. I feel it is important to promote communication channels and define a structure where all TeX users worldwide can profit from new developments. International collaborative efforts to coordinate the various activities in the field of TeX-related developments (LaTeX3, LuaTeX, TeX Gyre font project) have to be promoted by providing a framework that is both motivating and efficient. The basic needs of the various user communities, scientists and engineers, like at CERN, but also those of administrative and technical staff have to be taken into account.
At CERN I am a long-standing member of the Staff Council that deals with the employment conditions of CERN Staff, and the problems of social and cultural integration of CERN users and their families in the Geneva region. I am also an official CERN guide, and I take visitors to CERN on a tour of one of our world-famous experiments, the accelerator complex with its 27 km long LHC tunnel 100 m underground, or introduce them to our permanent exhibitions.
Photo (December 2010): 
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