mailing-list for TeXmacs Users

[Joris van der Hoeven <address@hidden>]

> Well, this is a complex problematics, and there's a clear lack of
> related software solutions. I see at least 5 points where TeXmacs could
> be the killer app:

Thanks for your detailed thoughts. We plan to implement part of this
in the year to come, although probably not in the near future.
When we will come to actual implementations,
would you be interested in helping us?

> 1) Revision history support
> 
> By "support", i mean to provide:
> - interaction with an external tool to allow the user to create
>   different revisions
> - a way of displaying semantic differences between two revisions
> 
> The first need should be quite easy to implement. The second one is more
> tricky. It requires to be able to determine the semantic differences
> between 2 documents A and B. If you consider A and B as simple trees,
> well I had a look to a french phd thesis which roughly said that it was
> *very* difficult. I could try to find the document again if you're
> interested. This is more easy -- though far from trivial -- with xml
> documents.

I do not see why diffs in XML documents would be easier,
since these can also be considered as trees and vice versa.

> A robust and definitive tool is still lacking, but the guys
> from Logilab have done a good work with XMLdiff
> (http://www.logilab.org/xmldiff).

Thanks for the pointer.

> 2) Collaborative edition of documents
> 
> This is related to 1) but requires additional features. I think this
> requires interaction with a server (perhaps TeXmacs-server ?) and this
> is where i thought the kind of interaction would be useful.

Yes, we indeed need something like a TeXmacs server.
This is precisely the part that I would like someone else to implement.
I looked a bit at Apache and Zope, but I came to the conclusion that
this would take me to much time and that it really should be done
by someone else, since it is almost independent from the TeXmacs side.

In fact, such a server should mainly detect when TeXmacs is used
as a browser to connect to a web resource (this can easily be implemented
using wget or curl) and undertake some special action in that case.
If you browse the pages with another program, then TeXmacs documents
on the server side might be automatically converted.

> 3) Collaborative annotations
> 
> I'm not sure about it but i think even if the technical guts to allow
> collaborative annotations are the same as 2), this is a different need
> in the way as in 2) the structure of the document itself evolves,
> whereas here i speak about annotations which are meta-informations
> associated to parts of the document.

Yes, this is something that we want to add. This is really a matter of
inventing appropriate markup. We want to setup a project together with
Alain Herreman, a historian of mathematics; in their area they need
these kind of features quite a lot. They also need lots of types of
annotations for documentation purposes.

> Another very interesting use: if all the above stuff was possible, it
> would allow articles to be refereed, maybe this could require little
> workflow management but i'm convinced people mostly want things to
> reliable, simple and stupid so to my mind it would not be necessary.

Yes, this is another dream of mine: create some kind of TeXmacs-based
server (although other formats should be supported too) on a similar
model as freshmeat, slashdot, etc. where you can create journals,
submit and referee articles, publish them, etc.

> 4) Group scheduling
> 
> Okay: this may look ridiculous at first sight. But wait a minute. How do
> you think groups keep informed about their disponibilities ? Roughly
> speaking, there are two cases. First case, they bought Lotus Notes, and
> it rules Second case, they try to find the secretary but she's not here,
> or she doesn't have the informations needed, because people didn't give
> them to her.

Good point. I never really though about this.

> 5) Dynamic reports creation 
> 
> Know Crystal Reports or Business Objects ? These are very expensive
> software which basically (i mean, this is what people need them to do in
> 99% of the time) perform queries on a database and create nice tables
> containing the needed data. You would be terrified if you knew how these
> products cost, especially regarding their final use.
> 
> This would be a very useful thing if TeXmacs could interact with a dbms
> (directly or not, this is not the key point) to allow reports to be
> dynamically created. I mean, this is a thing to be able to generate a
> report, and it is another one to let people create it dynamically, and i
> think this is what peole expect.

This is also part of our plans. We will both include tools in order
to create documents (trees) using the Guile extension and enhance
our interface with computer algebra systems (or other systems,
like databases), such as to allow extern tools to create or
retrieve information.

Thanks once more for your thoughts, Joris