mailing-list for TeXmacs Users

[Joris van der Hoeven <address@hidden>]

> First I would like to say that although I am an avid LaTeX user I was
> drawn to TeXmacs because it had the ability to to integrate CAS into the
> document.  This is especially helpful for teachers wishing to
> demonstrate how to use software.

Thanks; this was precisely one of our goals :^)

> Soon I will be teaching a course that will involve some Octave work.  I
> have been trying to configure an Octave session but have not had too
> much luck.  I have followed the instruction included with TeXmacs as
> well as the quick how-to on the Wikki. IT seems there have been a few
> other people interested in this feature but haven't found any info about
> someone actually getting it to work.

At the moment, we do not yet have an interface for Octave.
This is indeed on top of our list of systems for which we would
like to have an interface, but nobody has found the time yet
to do the actual implementations.

Connecting new systems to TeXmacs should not be very hard to do and
the current interfacing mechanism by pipes is well documented
(see Help->interfacing), so you may try to write the interface yourself.
In the case of Octave, it is not clear to me how much time this would
require; for well designed computer algebra systems, this can be
a matter of a few days or even hours. However, this presupposes that
the input/output has been made sufficiently modular. I do not know
the Octave source code sufficiently well in order to judge this.

> In summary I created a personal my-init-texmacs.scm file to generate a
> new menu entry under sessions for Octave.  Then I edited program.ts in
> the main TeXmacs path to add the style functions for the interface (Is
> there a way that I can place these changes in my personal .Texmacs
> directory? --- easier for me to keep track when upgrading).  <see below
> for the actual files>
> 
> When I fire up TeXmacs after making these modifications the whole
> session menu disappears from the insert menu.  When I use my old
> program.ts then the session menu appears with Octave.  Of course if I
> run it then TeXmacs just complains since it doesn't know how to interact
> with octave.
> 
> Any suggestions?

First of all, I would suggest to switch to the latest version of TeXmacs.
Secondly, I suggest to first write a mycas program or script as explained
in Help->interfacing. If that program/script works well, then I will do
the necessary things in order to incorporate your work in the standard
TeXmacs distribution under the name Octave. You may also ask Andrey Grozin,
who has written many interfaces for TeXmacs for help (address@hidden).

Thanks for your interest,

Joris