mailing-list for TeXmacs Users

[Yannick Patois <address@hidden>]

Hi,

On Wed, 6 Nov 2002, Joris van der Hoeven wrote:
> Well, you allready have "export verbatim".
> I slightly improved this filter for the next version,
> so that italic text and so will be exported correctly.

How... That's what 'verbatim' means ? I thought, as 'Verbatim' means
'whithout any changes' that it would be in .tm format !
Never saw any software who used 'Verbatim' for 'Text' <- maybe change it ?

> It also depends very much on what you understand by
> a "text version of my document". For instance: do you want long
> lines to be wrapped?

Doesnt matter much.

> This may be useful for texts, but it would be
> bad for programs. Also: how to export mathematical symbols or
> special types of markup?

As best as you can. Perform the process I mentionned in my previous
emails: Titles are here (distinguishable by their position),
paragraph are well formated (even justified), table of content is
generated... That's already not too bad.

Make it for human readability first, not computer one.

> Notice that the TeXmacs document format in itself should be very
> readable in the case that you just typed a plain text...

Yes, and I appraciate it.

> Because XML is not more readable than the current format,
> although I agree that you have more tools for XML.
> Nevertheless, we plan to write filters for XML,
> just as we already have filters for Scheme.
> The readability of the native TeXmacs format will
> also be further improved in the future.

I agree. But it's only a question on representation, then.

May I suggest:
- Base your format on pure XML.
- Form that derive a 'better readable' format (like the one you currently
have, except maybe for the strange <\something>)).

If this is done well, both formats will be formally synonyms, TeXmacs will
use its own for .tm as it is more easy to hack it by hand, but a a very
simple converter (maybe a few hundreds lines of perl) should be able to
perform the convertion to a valid XML (replace \n\n by <par> and things
like that).

Moreover, all TeXmacs internals could then work from the XML
representation, which is probably interesting.

Does it seems a somewhat good idea ?

        Yannick

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