Deutschsprachige Anwendervereinigung TeX e. V., or DANTE e. V., is the German-language TeX users group. With about 2000 members, it is the largest TeX users group worldwide.[citation needed]
DANTE was founded on 14 April 1989 in the German city of Heidelberg by a handful of TeX enthusiasts who had met formerly on a non-regular basis.
According to its statutes, DANTE consults TeX users from all German-speaking countries and funds TeX-related projects. It also represents members towards other TeX users groups.
DANTE runs the main CTAN backbone server, dante.ctan.org.
Conferences with talks, tutorials and general member meetings are held bi-annually on changing locations all over the German-speaking countries. The conferences are free of charge for everyone interested in TeX.
The member journal, Die TeXnische Komödie (German for "The TeXnical comedy", a pun on Dante's Divine Comedy referring back to the group's name), is published quarterly.
DANTE's international counterpart is the TeX Users Group (TUG) that was founded in 1980.
