mailing-list for TeXmacs Users

[Henri Lesourd <address@hidden>]

> Probably this is pretty obvious for most of you, but I' a little bit slow...
>
> With the new graphics mode is possible to plot a function and add things 
> (arrows, remarks, ....) over the plot. The process is quite simple. First, 
> insert a new 'Draw image'. Then insert a text box, inside this text box you 
> can plot any function (plot curve) or surface. After that you could add 
> whatever you wanted to the figure. I include an example of this.
>
> Yesterday I talked with one of the math professors of the university I worked 
> and he seemed really interested in this graphic mode. At last, TeXmacs offers 
> him something he cannot do using LaTeX! Now he plots diagrmas using Adobe 
> Illustrator, then he has to export'em as ps and insert'em in the LaTeX files. 
> It's a quite long and messy process. TeXmacs could become a great time saver 
> for him.
>
>  
Yes, you can use the way you describe in the graphics mode
to annotate images (that remains one the best ways, especially
if you want to put several images together, and draw things in
between, like arrows that link two images, etc.).

I plan to work quite soon on another related feature, namely
adding background images to a graphics.

It should be noted that the possibility of generating TeXmacs
graphics using a program remains an option. In such a case,
the sine function of your example file would directly be
approximated in the graphics as an interpolated spline.
For drawing a sine, the feature already exists (I suppose
you made the draw with GnuPlot, isn't it ?), so there is
no need do implement it again in another way.

But for new applications, directly generating TeXmacs graphics
could be an interesting option, because on the one hand,
the corresponding TeXmacs document could be lighter, and
on the other hand, you remove a computation layer (namely,
the layer GnuPlot->Postscript) ; depending on what you want
to do, you could also probably obtain a better control on
what you generate. For an example of drawings graphics using
a program, you can have a look at the end of my tutorial :
<<
  http://www.ags.uni-sb.de/~henri/texmacs/aTeXmacsGraphicsTutorial.pdf
  http://www.ags.uni-sb.de/~henri/texmacs/ (for some other material)
>>

If there are some people that have ideas related to new
applications that generate graphics into TeXmacs, I can
provide help to turn these ideas to reality.

Best, Henri