mailing-list for TeXmacs Users

[Stéphane Payrard <address@hidden>]

On (06/11/02 13:38), Yannick Patois wrote:
> Date: Wed, 6 Nov 2002 13:38:43 +0100 (CET)
> From: Yannick Patois <address@hidden>
> To: <address@hidden>
> Subject: Re: TeXmacs on live linux CDs
> Reply-To: address@hidden
> 
> Hi,
> 
> (there are some 'Dr' we've better to simply ignore here ;)
> 
> On Wed, 6 Nov 2002, David Allouche wrote:
> [Porting TeXmacs to windows]
> 
> Just one thing: would it be easier to just first port a viewer or is it
> the same ?
> What's interest me here is to be able to tell ppl who use windows "I send
> you this file" (a small convenient .tm format), "if you dont have texmacs,
> there you can just download the viewer".

Distributing a viewer is a marketting choice for closed projects not a
technical one. It makes no sense for TeXmacs; more so because you can
generate documents for which viewers already exist.

> 
> I wrote a very simple text I wanted to send recently. TeXmacs file was
> 14ko, generated pdf file was 150ko: I finally sent a text version...
> 
> By the way, [WISH] : "Export to Text", seems usefull.
> Right now, I do:
> 1- Export to LaTeX
> 2- latex2html
> 3- lynx --dump
> To get a text version of my document !
> (the direct conversion to HTML doesnt worth  to be mentionned).
> 
> And OK, maybe I should subscribe to dev, but:
> Is there a good reason for the document internal formating NOT being XML ?
> Everything could be simpler then (conversion, and even visualisation with
> any xml viewer).

Disclaimer: I am not specialist of TeXmacs internals. 

The internal format is a tree, not an attributed tree like
XML. Dealing internally with an attributed tree would mean adding an
associative table for each node. A big potential performance hit. A
focus on performance is (currently) a more critical issue than
internals matching the XML DOM.  Also XML means Unicode support which
TeXmacs currently does not support.

My understanding of TeXmacs positionning:

It is an interactive typesetting tool. It does does one thing very
well instead of pretending to solve many problems. Even if my own
interest is broader, I feel that this positionning makes a lot of
sense.
  


> 
>       Yannick

--
  stef