Sent: Monday, July 12, 2021 at 7:51 PM
From: "Massimiliano Gubinelli" <address@hidden>
To: "Christopher Dimech" <address@hidden>
Cc: "Basile Audoly" <address@hidden>, "texmacs-users" <address@hidden>
Subject: Re: arXiv

>Dear Christopher,

 >you can read here the submission guidelines

 

>https://arxiv.org/help/submit#text

 

>Where they say that they accept PDF which is clearly not true, since they do not accept our PDF files.

 

>They explicitly say:

 

>"Our goal is to store articles in formats that are highly portable and stable over time. Currently, the best choice is TeX/LaTeX."

 

Thank you Massimiliano.  After reviewing their strategy, I do not see how arXiv is actually interested in Free Software.  But

actual progress has- been happenning at Rice University, at MIT, Poland and Spain.

 

>I make you ponder the fact that if nobody tries to challenge the status quo the current best choice will be the choice for the next 50 years. Irrespective of its >technical merits. I do not see how this what free software is about. It should be more about allowing people to use the best public technologies to express >themselves and leave to the technology the burden of uninteresting tasks.

 

>Personally I would be satisfied if a subset of TeX/LaTeX could be agreed upon which allows to use it as a document exchange/storage format. (Think about >the passage from PS to PDF). I think this is a more worthy endeavour than to criticise our, in my opinion, fair right to request that arXiv remove a bug in their >PDF-analysis program. 

 

Although not taking the source specific criticism is unfortunate, I can see the basis of your request and consider it valid.

 

I will look into this as a worthy endeavour.

 

Felicitations

Christopher

 

>Best regards,

>Massimiliano Gubinelli

 

 

>PS: recently with some colleagues we submitted a paper to a (good) mathematical journal, written in LaTeX (i.e. no TeXmacs since my coauthors do not use >it). The proofs which came back from the editor were a complete mess, it required a 10 pages letter to indicate all the corrections to be made and a couple >of weeks of back/forth mail exchange. So you see, when you look in the details, things are not so nice as they seems. Not to mention that unless you install >on your machine ~3GB of useless packages you are not really sure to be able to reproduce a given output from your "highly portable and stable" source >code.

 

I understand your criticism about the useless packages.  Basic Latex should be expanded if need be, and a few specific utilities accepted.

But not more than that.  Allowing one to use any package would certainly limit the validity of my arguments. The problem of making documents

still prevails after more than forty years. 

 

 

 

 

On 12. Jul 2021, at 03:09, Christopher Dimech <address@hidden> wrote:

 

>Sent: Sunday, July 11, 2021 at 2:31 AM
>From: "Basile Audoly" <address@hidden>
>To: "Christopher Dimech" <address@hidden>
>Cc: "texmacs-users" <address@hidden>
>Subject: Re: arXiv

>Dear Christopher,

 

>No, it would definitely be easier (and more logical) to have arXiv correct the bug that erroneously tags PDF files as being produced by LaTeX once for all, >than to require every single TeXmacs submission to be exported to LaTeX.

 

>Currently, arXiv is accepting PDF produced by MS word but blocking those produced by TeXmacs.

 

If that is so, I would criticise harshly their modus-operandi.

 

>Your point about the TeXmacs format sounds unfair to me. TeXmacs is far more structured than LaTeX which does not follow a well-defined grammar. >Parsing meta-data from TeXmacs source is trivial.

 

Beyond the technical, there are other considerations.  Whilst it could be well structured according to some software engineering metric.

But its syntactic format is not more accessible to code modification than tex or latex, or to any other programming language.  I might

understand the production of an internal format that fits in with a more structured format for what you want to do.  But in doing so, you

have removed an important aspect.  Whilst it could be acceptable with schools and colleges, I do not see how to avoid the observation

I have made.

 

Myself, I would reject outputs from GUI that I would not be able to modify myself using a basic editor. Whilst I understand the work people

have put in it, introducing a syntactic format for users to change directly would allow others to understand the document without superficial

barriers.

 

I an not convinced that my evaluation has been unfair.  arXiv is certainly being unfair accepting outputs from MS.  Does arXiv accept docements

and source done with texinfo commands?

 

Felicitations

Christopher

 

>Best wishes,

>Basile

 

Le 10 juil. 2021 à 16:01, Christopher Dimech <address@hidden> a écrit :

 

Would it not be easier if you can export a latex version, and send that for arXiv.  TeXmacs has its own typesetting engine, but it's format

as with xml is almost impossible to work with from source.  That is the fundamental criticism about TeXmacs.  It's design is not 

germaine to use from source. 

 

----- Christopher Dimech
Administrator General - Naiad Informatics - Gnu Project

Society has become too quick to pass judgement and declare someone
Persona Non-Grata, the most extreme form of censure a country can
bestow.

In a new era of destructive authoritarianism, I support Richard
Stallman.  Times of great crisis are also times of great
opportunity.  I call upon you to make this struggle yours as well !

https://stallmansupport.org/
https://www.fsf.org/     https://www.gnu.org/
 

 

 

 

.

 

Sent: Sunday, July 11, 2021 at 1:23 AM
From: "Basile Audoly" <address@hidden>
To: "texmacs-users" <address@hidden>
Subject: arXiv

Dear TeXmacs users,

arXiv is blocking submissions from TeXmacs. I have submitted for the following bug report with them. I would encourage you to send a similar email if you encounter difficulties. Maybe they will take it seriously if many of us complain?

Best wishes,

Basile

 

Hello,

I am writing my papers using GNU TeXmacs (www.texmacs.org), a wonderful, free, multi-platform editor for scientific documents. Its name might be misleading but TeXmacs is *not* related to TeX/LaTeX: it has its own typesetting engine.

When I submit to arXiv a PDF file produced with TeXmacs, it is incorrectly recognized as being produced by LaTeX, and the submission process is blocked until I provide the latex sources which do not exist. This makes it effectively impossible to submit TeXmacs document to arXiv. This is very unfortunate as TeXmacs is a great software, arguably superior to LaTeX in several aspects.

I am attaching a sample TeXmacs document. I am hoping that you can either correct your LaTeX detection algorithm so that similar documents do not get erroneously blocked, or let me know which properties of the PDF document exactly are used to tag it as being produced LaTeX, so I can help the TeXmacs developers identify a work-around.

TeXmacs is a great free software that needs encouragements from our community and not additional barriers.

Best wishes,

(your name here)