My name is Vít and I have been developing free open-source software for the past 10 years.

I am the creator and the lead developer of the Markdown package for TeX, which enables the creation of beautiful documents in TeX using beautiful lightweight markup. I am also among the top ten most active developers of the Gensim natural language processing library, where I implement and maintain state-of-the-art techniques for information retrieval search engines. If you would like to know more, I give a detailed account of my work in the areas of digital typesetting and information retrieval below.

At the moment, free open-source software development is a (serious) hobby that I pursue in my free time. However, since the birth of my son in 2021, free time has been in short supply. With your funding, I hope to devote more time to free open-source software development by making it my part-time job.

Digital Typesetting and Markdown

During my undergraduate studies in 2012–2015, I have become familiar with the TeX programming language for typesetting digital documents. Under the tutelage of prof. Petr Sojka, the president of the Czech TeX Users Group, I have developed a number of free open-source document templates for my alma mater in TeX, taught a course and wrote a free book about electronic document preparation, and became the technical editor and the deputy editor in chief of the Czech TeX Users Group Bulletin.

In 2016, I realized that although TeX could be used to produce beautiful documents, it required programming expertise from authors and did not provide high-level abstractions to programmers. To tackle the second concern, the LaTeX3 high-level programming language was being developed for TeX, but there was no project that would tackle the lack of a declarative markup language for the authors. Therefore, I designed and developed the Markdown package for TeX, which enabled the use of the lightweight markup language of markdown for writing documents in TeX. I have been developing and maintaining the Markdown package ever since.

Information Retrieval and Gensim

During my graduate and doctoral studies in 2016–2022, I studied document representations that would enable fast and accurate information retrieval. During 2016–2017, I participated on the research and development of the ScaleText search engine, which enabled scalable semantic text search. During 2017–2021, I have been developing the search engine of the Masaryk University library catalogue. During 2020–2022, I participated in the Answer Retrieval for Questions on Math (ARQMath) series of shared task evaluations.

In my research, I used the free open-source Gensim library. To make the results of my research available outside the research community, I have been contributing code to Gensim since 2018.