mailing-list for TeXmacs Users

[Joris van der Hoeven <address@hidden>]

On Thu, 24 Jun 2004, Joseph Coffey wrote:
> In general  I love the program however the export filters need some
> work.  Even electronic submission to the arxiv requires us to submit
> latex code, not postscript or pdf.
>
> My first attempt at exporting my document created the following
> difficulties. Since "will it export clean latex code" is the first
> question anyone asks me when I tell them about texmacs I think it is
> important that this process be as pain free as possible.

We all agree even though we should try to push publishers harder at
supporting TeXmacs as a native format. We start to a have some contacts
at Springer-Verlag, but it would really be helpful to always insist on
sending papers in the native TeXmacs format.

> It complains that it doesn't know where macros.sty is. I assume this is
> because either: The filter doesn't export the macro file.

This is probably the right behaviour; I tend to interpret style files
as hyperlinks which need to be exported separately.

> Then, I manually exported the macro file, and copied all the
> newcommands inot my pre-amble.

Yes, you can do that, or export to a separate .cls file. I would have to
check whether this needs some special additional header information.

>  The resulting document more or less compiled but it
> generated many many  errors (35-50).  In addition some portions of my
> document were lost:
>
> at least:
> my abstract is gonet.

That is strange.

> a big coproduct sign is missing.

I need to see this in order to believe that.

> my bibliography is gone.

Bibliographies need to be regenerated with BiBTeX.
One may argue whether this is the best behaviour possible,
or whether we should generate bibitem statements and forget
about the bib file.

> I suspect there are other difficulties as well.

Please let me know of any other difficulties. We try to do our best at
making the LaTeX export filter as good as possible, but there are some
tricky issues.