- From: Joris van der Hoeven <address@hidden>
- To: address@hidden
- Subject: Re: [TeXmacs] this years thoughts about TeXmacs (in particular, lulu.com-compatible PDF)
- Date: Fri, 7 Aug 2009 18:43:21 +0200
Hi David,
On Wed, Aug 05, 2009 at 11:59:22AM -0400, David G. Wonnacott wrote:
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I'm once again doing my annual release of TeXmacs-produced documents
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on lulu.com (so far, easier this year than last), and thought I'd
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share my latest thoughts about this process, and some other thoughts
>
about TeXmacs (below).
Thanks for your comments. Several of the points you have raised
are currently being worked on, or planned for soon: version control,
font reorganization, etc. However, we have to respect a bit of order
in order not to mess up everything. For instance, a working Qt version
comes before a thorought font reorganization. Better image support
will probably follow more or less automatically when switching to Qt.
Best wishes, Joris
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**** Thoughts About Fonts Not Embedded in PDF Files ****
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A few minor discoveries eased the production of the particular flavor
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of PDF that lulu.com (and some others) like --- the biggest challenge
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here has consistently been getting a document completely free of
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references to fonts that are not embedded (I believe I wrote to the
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email list about this last year).
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>
The first step is, of course, to use Type 1 fonts. This is even easier
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on our linux machines this year --- my students didn't have to do
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anything special (perhaps they are now distributed by default when
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Ubuntu installs TeXmacs?).
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>
Several subsequent steps were needed last year, to deal with things
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like embedded figures such as .fig files produced by xfig or .eps
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files from gnuplot. This year's realizations:
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>
* switching to .svg files edited by inkscape (rather than .fig files
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from xfig) is easy (just save as .svg in a current version of
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xfig), and .svg files in TeXmacs documents don't create the same
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sort of "font not included" problems that the .fig files did. This
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is much nicer than my old approach (perhaps it was "use transfig
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to produce a .eps and then include that"?).
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* gnuplot can be asked not to embed the font it uses, and this works
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(e.g., via
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set terminal postscript eps font "NimbusSanL-Regu" fontfile
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"/usr/share/texmf-texlive/fonts/type1/urw/helvetic/uhvr8a.pfb"
>
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). Note that I was not impressed by the .svg export of gnuplot,
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in that it wouldn't open properly in inkscape or TeXmacs (though
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I'm not sure whose fault this is), and also I never could figure
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out how to get .svg or .png output to use grayscale rather than
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color.
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>
With these two changes, I quickly got a lulu-suitable PDF (for
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example, see http://www.lulu.com/content/7469213, but note that
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unfortunately lulu.com does not seem to have a nice way to send a book
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cover as a PDF rather than an image file).
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>
>
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**** A Couple Other Thoughts About TeXmacs ****
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>
* Version Control *
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>
This year saw my first attempt at multi-author work in TeXmacs. I
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think a (few?) years ago I saw an email about connections of TeXmacs
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to an existing version control system (CVS?), but a current google
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search of "texmacs version control" doesn't indicate anything about
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this being done --- in fact, the top hit in this search (which was
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http://www.texmacs.org/tmweb/about/plans.en.html ) shows "Version
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Control" in the google search, but this text does not appear on the
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web page itself. Has this feature been abandoned? That would be
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distressing, as support for multi-author document is #1 on my TeXmacs
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wish list. At least "A native spreadsheet and tools for collaborative
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authoring are planned for later" still remains in the online manual at
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http://www.texmacs.org/tmweb/manual/webman-about.en.html.
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>
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* Support for Included Images/Spreadsheets/etc in TeXmacs Documents *
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>
As noted above, I imported a number of figures from .svg into
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TeXmacs. (I've not tried the native TeXmacs document editor, and don't
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have any strong feeling about it, but I'm familiar with inkscape as
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sometimes I need to edit figures outside of TeXmacs, e.g. .svg files
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for wikibooks.org).
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>
It seems to me that a couple of simple things could be done to improve
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support for included images, etc.:
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* I am unable to find any easy way to tell TeXmacs that I've
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edited the .svg file online, to have TeXmacs load the new
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version and re-format my document with it. Perhaps I've
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overlooked something simple (apologies if so), but it seems to
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me this ought to be easy (like refreshing a bibliography).
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>
* Another should-be-easy tweak would be to allow double-clicking
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or some pop-up menu option to automatically fire-up an external
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editor on the linked file (e.g., for .svg files, start inkscape,
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or some editor set in TeXmacs preference, or best of all
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whatever is chosen by gnome-open on linux or "open" on MacOS).
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>
This approach might also be part of an easier way to embed
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spreadsheets in a document, though of course communication of values
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in the TeXmacs document into the spreadsheet would be tricky ---
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despite being a many-decades fan of emacs, I'm more a fan of "a tool
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for each job" than the "one tool to rule them all" philosophy. I'm
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very happy with the support for many different computer algebra
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systems in TeXmacs, for example, and perhaps this would be a good
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model for building a connection to something like OpenOffice
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spreadsheets or gnumeric (or best of all some widely-supported
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XML-based file that describes a spreadsheet and view thereof).
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>
It's really too bad there isn't some standard way for applications to
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share an image being displayed in an X11 window or generated in a PDF
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document. This whole "one application per window" thing really works
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against the "a tool for each job" philosophy, but that's a rant for
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another day.
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>
>
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To anyone who has bothered to read this far, thanks for your patience.
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To anyone else, don't complain, since you can (and did) easily just
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stop reading.
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>
Dave Wonnacott
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