mailing-list for TeXmacs Users

[Álvaro Tejero Cantero <address@hidden>]

Hello, 

I have been reading your mails and your contributions and will do my best to 
dissipate the doubts we all have concerning the wiki. With those problems 
that we identify I will fill a dedicated page in our TeXmacsResources wiki so 
that we can comment further and analyze the situation. Update (It takes hours 
to write this mails) please, don't forget to tell me if I forgot to respond 
to some question, I am trying here a collective answer to many individual 
doubts).

1. Which Wiki. Which limitations.

I have installed a ZWiki because of several reasons. Perhaps it is true that 
there are more functional (i.e. i18n aware) wiki-implementations around. But 
ZWiki has some advantages, which perhaps explain the decision.

a - Zope (http://www.zope.org) based. Almost everything stems from here (both 
the good and the bad things).
  a.1. zope allows to put into practice the "distributed administration" 
paradigm. That is, for the wiki and non-wiki pages, it allows a certain set 
of administrators to maintain, edit, etc different areas of a website. This 
is something desirable (at least for me! XD).

  a.2 ZCatalog. Zope comes with an object database in which ZWiki pages get 
indexed and thus it is foreseeable that advanced search methods will be 
available soon.

  a.3 Authentication. Zope has its own authentication system, using the 
browser's infrastructure. This allows a very very fine tuning of the 
permissions while retaining the uniform authentication interface of many 
webapplications.

  a.4. Transactional. The Z Object Database (ZODB) allows a recovery of a 
damaged page, because a transaction history is shown in the admin interface. 
Just go to alqua.com/tmresources/manage and see by yourselves.

  a.5 Executable content. This is not a drawback since you decide how much 
you allow your users to do. Basicly, it means they can use DTML (Zope's 
presentation language) inside ZWikis, which allows very cool things to be 
done. Zope is "secure by default" in its use of Python (only some modules 
allowed) so that eventually raw Python code could be allowed as well.

 a.6 Cool! ZWikis can be edited through Emacs, WebDAV.... and perhaps 
TeXmacs!!

If you want I could take the work of migrating the TeXmacs.org pages to Zope, 
but zope would then have to be installed at texmacs.org.  Instead we could 
install a different WikiImplementation, such as TWiki, MoinMoin, WikiWiki.... 
there are just too many of them to list here. But on with the advantages of 
ZWiki.

b. Has the "Hierarchical Structure" option which is very interesting to avoid 
creating too sparse a wiki. I like it very much.

c. Has the Comment field. Very useful to allow people to comment almost every 
page (that way bugs ---such as bad explanations, typos... get reported in the 
same page).

d. Has the Subscription option (either in a per-page basis or to the whole 
Wiki). The mailing list won't die!

e. Has the Diff option (although it is not very developed in the installed 
version, I think CVS is ahead in this) to see a history of the pages.

f. Is written in Python (very readable).

g. Depends on Zope's StructuredText (STX) zclass, for which converters exist 
(notably, to LaTeX. Unpublished, I have a private copy from the guy who did 
it). Zope's StructuredText (search google) is, likely, a much more standard 
StructuredText than anyone's else (because Zope itself has a wider community 
than, say FooWiki). I don't think it is difficult to make TeXmacs STX aware, 
you can read at the wiki a (admittedly not very good) explanation of its main 
conventions.

g. I'm going to invest some time in it because I want 
<rough description>
 to develop a graph-based wiki for both modular and objectivable disciplines 
(science) in which navigational behavior would be associated to a new type of 
relation between the pages, called "dependency" (the level of epistemological 
complexity is intentionally not pushed further, after all wikiwikiness is, 
mainly, equivalent to simplicity) so that somebody would enter the system 
saying "I want to get to SchrödingerEquation" and would be returned a 
(user-background-dependent) list of nodes to progress through ( in order to 
achieve his/her goal. If you're interested further in this I can be more 
specific, but take into account that my examinations are at the corner! ;).
</rough description>

Drawbacks.
- Pages are buried on the ZODB, although they can be exported to the 
filesystem and are then just plain text files (with a #ThisIsMyParent 
indication at the beginning).

- i18n is somewhat broken. I want to fix that, but the guys at zope haven't 
taken a decision on which the i18n tool is The Right One. Meanwhile, ZWiki 
can recover (somebody broke it) the ability to handle all latin1 characters 
and still render properly the pages.

- some problems when editing with mozilla. I think this is very 
circumstantial, because everything seems right with galeon. 

- The gif icon in the upper left corner can be very easily changed for a 
custom image (the texmacs logo? send me an adequately sized one, please), so 
this is no problem (this answers David's plea for a patent free page).

On the whole I think ZWiki is very useful and perhaps enough for us. I would 
advise to run Zope on the TeXmacs server, although if this is not desirable 
(RMS devotees as we seem to be, we should look closely the **new** ZPL) I am 
willing to maintain it at alqua.com, <shameless plug>which on the other hand 
is a project which aims at freeness of knowledge, but at the level of 
univesity courses, not research papers</shameless plug>.

2. Import-export capabilities.

STX2Latex already exists. The generated latex code can't possibly be very 
complex!.

I am going to add an extension to ZWiki so that it can process $ 
\math\Latex\code$ (I don't know very precisely how to render it, but that's 
another story. Interested people: alqua.com/zd/AcercaDe). This could be 
passed almost literally to TeXmacs, since it can read LaTeX \'s.

STX2HTML is what ZWiki **is**, mainly. I think ZWiki generates HTML 3.2 
compliant documents. One of my aims with ZWiki is making it XHTML 1.0 
compliant (well formed tags, attributes, etc).

TeXmacs2STX... Well.. as long as there is TeXmacs2HTML there's STX. ZWiki can 
handle STX, HTML and DTML currently.

Direct Wiki Edition... This could be a TeXmacs mode. After all, emacs does it 
already!. Such a gateway would make TeXmacs even more of a killer application.

Uploading files & images

Go to UserOptions and set "advanced edit options" for your user. A new form 
field appears at the end of the pages which lets you select the file in your 
local filesystem.

Frames and navigation aids

This is trivial in zope, and you implement it via <dtml-var morceau-de-page>. 
Using frames is a very bad Idea, but using a sidebar is not. Zope allows this 
very easily. Again, I refer you yo alqua.com/zd (where two of this dynamic 
navigantional aids have been implemented).

Whole-wiki backups

Very easy between zope servers (you just export one file and import somewhere 
else). Mirroring hmm, I never thought of that for a wiki....

Math in the web through TeXmacs

I am absolutely interested in this. Zwiki is small and  easily customizable, 
but what sort of portable "thing" would TeXmacs produce for rendering in the 
web browser?.

Subscription

If it's not working it could be because I did not add a "mailhost" object. 
I'll fix this.

The end...
I cannot remember more issues, but if you agree I can start melting all this 
into the ImproveThisWiki node created by david. I'll do some 
refactoring/restructuring of the site, also. Please, feel free to contribute 
everybody (we are 101 subscribers!! sometimes questions are as importants as 
answers (especially to achieve a good design), so please,

Have a free new year and go to TeXmacsPeople in 
alqua.com/tmresources/TeXmacsPeople to write about your expectations and the 
ways you plan to use TeXmacs. !

Greets!

-- 
álvaro.tejero.cantero
alqua.com, la red en estudio