mailing-list for TeXmacs Users

[Joris van der Hoeven <address@hidden>]

On Sun, 22 Jun 2003 address@hidden wrote:
> I'm having a lot of free time in this vacation so I was plannig to
> work on something wich I call TeXmacs powered CAS documentation.

That would be a very valuable contribution.
I will reply in more detail to your comments below soon;
it would be good to have this discussion on the developers
mailing list address@hidden

Thanks for your efforts, Joris

> The idea is to convert some info and HTML files of CAS (like Maxima,
> Yacas, etc) in TeXmacs documents. In this way, for example, when you
> invoke help in that systems inside TeXmacs you get an interactive
> document wich explains the use of the system, but the code of the CAS
> refered to some function or example is in fact a session of that CAS
> inside the TeXmacs powered doc. Something similar at the moment is
> present in Maxima session where you can invoke the Manual, but it is
> composed of HTML files, not  files, the idea is convert them to  to
> bring them interactivity (for me the most appealing feature of
> TeXmacs). The idea carries some questions, I hope you can help me:
>
> * May be will be necesary to change some part of the documentation to
> refer at the process inside TeXmacs, for example in the HTML version
> of the Maxima Manual you see that for calling Maxima you type maxima
> command at shell but you don't make this calling Maxima inside
> TeXmacs, so a cosmetic change is required here. So do you know what is
> the licence of the documentation for Maxima, Yacas, Octave, Scilab
> (and similar CAS)?
>
> * May be we can create some kind of info2html script (or use the
> existing one) for showing info pages of CAS systems inside  in a new
> buffer. In that way we can have a nice hipertextual document output
> instead of the long plain text response that at this moment we get.
> Most of time after consulting this help we delete it because invoking
> help  is not the purpose of the document that we are writing with the
> CAS, so having the output of that help in a separate buffers makes a
> lot of sense to me. At the same time it gives the user a sense of
> consistency of the scientific writer, because if you want to browse
> help nicely you dont have to go to shell for that. (Is the same that
> when you have the posibility to browse help files inside the konqueror
> or nautilus file/internet browsers. The end user feels that is using a
> integrate comprensive solution).
>
> * Layers of document: At this moment we have some of this with the
> idea of folding and unfolding. If we are making TeXmacs powered docs
> may be we dont wish to show the code that produce a figure for
> example, but we only want to show that figure. May be we can put that
> code in a diferent layer and fold it and "above" that we can put the
> output. Most of CAS programs can produce is some way a postscript
> output of figures and TeXmacs can render postscript fine, will be nice
> to have a "macro" wich make this process more automatic (creating a
> figure from CAS commands and insert/link it to a TeXmacs document).
> The idea of Layers can be extended to put, for example, in a inferior
> layer the data of a stadistic problem and above the R session wich
> handles that data. The files can be inserted or linked (like with
> images files at the moment) so the user have the posibility to carry
> in a simple document all the info he need to make his work.
>
> I want to make some contribution in this vacation to CAS comunity
> (specially using TeXmacs, the CAS glue ;-) ). I can help also with
> localization to spanish for some doc, and I offered before to try to
> make another Scheme interpreter work with TeXmacs, but I feel that the
> TeXmacs powered doc can help to more people and is more suited to me.
> Any advice or indication about where to start will be apreciated.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Offray