mailing-list for TeXmacs Users

[Joris van der Hoeven <address@hidden>]

Hi Carlos,

I am sorry for the late reply.

On Wed, 22 Oct 2003, Carlos Duarte wrote:
> I already mentioned this before, but TeXmacs is severely lacking in the
> bibliographic department which, for a scientific document writing tool, is
> somewhat serious.
>
> My main "gripes" with the bibliographic implementation of TeXmacs are:
>
> 1- Cumbersome way to add bibliography!
>
> When generating the bibliography, you have to guess (or remember) the name 
> of
> the BIBTeX style (.bst) you want to use! A simple submenu or command window,
> with the available styles (a bit like LyX does, it seems) would be extremely
> helpful!
> Also, it would be excellent if when updating the document for bibliography,
> TeXmacs could warn the user of bad reference keys! Having to scan the
> document for missing [?] is both time-wasting and bothersome.
>
> 2- Only "simpler" cites supported
>
> TeXmacs only seems to support simple citations, of the type "[citation]". A
> compatibility with natbib (or using natbib for generating citations) is
> essential. I, for one, am writing a paper on TeXmacs and I have to use the
> Elsevier style (which is natbib dependent) which is does not work well (due
> to the lack of natbib support) with TeXmacs. I am still trying to find a way
> around it, but its not easy. If anyone knows a way of using natbibt with
> TeXmacs, I would appreciate telling me how.
>
> 3- Cite-while-writing
>
> A Cite-while-you-write would be extremely useful for more "obscure" 
> citations.
> This would, of course, imply either adapting an existent bibligraphic 
> manager
> to TeXmacs (and the best one IMHO is wbibdb which runs under windows!!!) or
> writing a new one from scratch... This is more a suggestion than a 
> complaint!


I agree with everything you say, but I will not have time in the near
future to deal with these problems. In fact, the best solution would
be to have a native tool for dealing with bibliographies in TeXmacs,
because that (together with the font stuff) would allow us to get
rid of the dependency on TeX. So if there are volunteers...

It would be good if you could fill out a wish-list entry on Savannah
with your suggestions, as a reminder for the future.

> I know I might be asking for too much, but I do believe that for TeXmacs to
> get a firmer grip on the scientific publishing market it has to become more
> adequate to the task. Another thing that would be great (and now I might be
> pushing it a bit too far) is adding a pdf export option (i.e. compiling into
> PDF). Most publishers will accept PDF's while PS is not as widely accepted.

That has been done now.