mailing-list for TeXmacs Users

[Álvaro Tejero Cantero <address@hidden>]

Hello everybody,

I know some of the features I'm going to comment aren't so new in
TeXmacs, but at least they are new to me.


Cygwin TeXmacs
--------------
What did it happen with the project to include it in the main Cygwin
distribution? That would do much good to TeXmacs. On my side, I have had
problems when compiling with the latest cygwin. It complains when
arriving at evaluate.cc from an struct.h found in /usr/include/libguile
(sorry, no precise error description at hand, it's on a win XP machine
now unavailable to me).



Presentation mode
-----------------
It works for me under KDE but crashes the application under fluxbox.
Anyone could report about his/her favourite windowmanager?. It is a 
very nice feature, but it would be nicer if the keyboard worked for
navigating within. I think also that the "reduction factor" way of
calling "zoom" would welcome some thoughts. I don't think that
expression is very informative for newbies. Isn't it a legacy expression
from the DVI viewers around?. Please explain me why is it called that
way.
Also an icon for RF would make switching faster.

Folding structures
------------------
Folded is great but, why the empty bullet marker? There must be some
reason why you have implemented it that way, Joris, what is it? When I
thought about "folded" I was thinking about being able to fold/unfold by
double-clicking a section title, but after an explanation from David on
the demerits of recursive sections with regard to tree operations, I
understand it must be done otherwise. 
This folding thingy would be great to design a "note to other authors"
environment.
The folding environment raises again the debate of whether a
supplementary area giving visual clues about the underlying structure of
the document would be helpful or mostly annoying / superfluous. My
example for folding is the Scite source code editor, which uses the
margin to mark folded regions.

Switch & Superpose
------------------
I like to play with switch, although I have problems finding an
use-case. I would welcome ideas, because it's so cool!. I give my own:
the unoptimized version of an algorithm might be stored in one switch,
the optimized in the next, the actual code in the next, and so on. This
poses problems when producing an output document, because one might like
to see all switches one after another. This option AFAIK doesn't exist
now.  It's very dynamic, but I see most users just putting the
algorighms sequentially if no transition function is provided. 

I also see switch useful in demonstrating the use of styles in TeXmacs.

What's the aim of superpose?. I mean, what does that resolve? I see it's
a more general way to do strike-through, and it is funny indeed to
superpose \sum with \cup, but are there other intended uses?

For the documentation task I would like to be as informed as possible on
these features, that's why I make so many questions...

Variants
--------
They are great!!. Congrats, Joris, because they work amazingly well. It
remains to be seen what is the performance in long documents, a
preliminary test I made with an imported LaTeX document wasn't very
encouraging on that side. BTW, thanks for the improvements in the LaTeX
input filter, Gwenael!.

There's a slight bug I'd like to report in the variants.scm: "exercice"
and "problem" are variants. The typo in "exercice" prevents the variant
from using the exercise style.

I'm not sure whether variants belong with TeXmacs or with the user's
behavioursheet (document-dependent perhaps?) or if variants could be
reported somehow on the stylesheet. I think this has to be thought of
carefully.

Also I would very much welcome using variants for the paired bracketing
scheme I suggested some time ago (a shortcut to enter both delimiters at
the same time and have the cursor placed in the middle of them). It
would be nice to have variants change the delimiter style then.

Ultra-newbies
-------------
This is an experiment I am conducting with my mother (she's writing a
book on spanish geography), a person new to computers. I want TeXmacs to
pass the newbieuser test, because it performs so well already in many
respects that it would be a pity not to care about these users.

Specificly, my mother has problems with 1) detached selection, 2) the ->
arrow not wrapping lines, and 3) the line-movement commands. She also
crawls with the open file dialog because there's no distinct indication
of which is a directory listing and which area is a file listing.

On the bright side, once explained the nesting of environments in
TeXmacs it has become easy for her to do her complex lists of lists of
lists. She also has benefitted from the C-tab variant scheme, and it's
been very encouraging the use of A-backspace to remove enclosing
structure. So yes, I definitely think the new editing paradigm can be
taught (although more problems are to be expected, she's only
beginning).

Mathematical operators
----------------------

I have not yet settled my opinion about implicit operator syntax (type
more than one letter within a math environment and you get an operator).
There's people around arguing against on the case of "explicit is good"
(the python credo, somewhere in the internet). I also don't like having
to provide explicit spacing myself (although I ignore some feature for
this perhaps). In any case, I think any operator should inmediatly
create a child for its argument. Then, when you are inside log's
argument (marked by the customary blue box) you could C-tab to obtain
delimiter variants, including whitespace. 

The same principle could be applied for integral signs, sums, etc.

Structured boxes and their colouring
------------------------------------

I support the idea of colouring differently (but not too differently)
the inner structure, because that signals clearly what will operations
such as A-backspace apply to. I would also like "word" to be the lowest
level unit for "strong" "emphasis" and so on in absence of an explicit
selection. It seems people emphasizes 99% of the time whole words or
groups of them, not isolated characters.


Any comments or ideas are welcome.


have fun, álvaro.

PS. regarding translations, I'm willing to coordinate the spanish
subproject, with Offray and Pablo. Everybody else is invited. We'll have
though to structure and complete a plan to adress in order the most
important issues. I'll write something up in the wiki at the end of the
month.

I will also update the menu translations now their names seem stabilized
when 1.0.0.16 comes out.


-- 
álvaro.tejero.cantero
alqua.com, la red en estudio
"La perfection est atteinte non quand il ne reste rien à
ajouter, mais quand il ne reste rien à enlever"
Saint-Exupéry.