mailing-list for TeXmacs Users

[Norbert Nemec <address@hidden>]

What I've been doing, both for posters and articles, was to write the
content in TeXmacs, export to LaTeX and have an automatic postprocessing
script that modifies the LaTeX to produce a poster or article with the
correct format.

I.e., all the special details like the exact column positioning in the
poster, the poster header or the front matter of the article are written
directly into a LaTeX skeleton, but the bulk text is written in TeXmacs
and inserted into that skeleton automatically.

This does not help at all in designing the overall layout of the poster,
but I fear that TeXmacs is not very well suited to handle the layout of
a A0-page in any comfortable way.

Where it helps a lot, though, is in writing the bulk text of the poster
or the article very comfortably and edit the formulas with the best
formula editor I've ever seen. (Not only once at creation time, but also
for later changes.)

The conversion skript need not be very complex. All it has to do is to
cut away header and footer from the exported LaTex and replace them by a
template written by hand. For me it is a 20-line Python skript, but any
other skripting language should do just as well.



Alexander Schmolck wrote:

>Is TeXmacs suited for developing scientific posters for conferences? Has
>anyone done so and can give some pointers? 
>
>Whilst TeXmacs doesn't currently meet my needs for writing articles (although
>I still find it handy for writing and then exporting formulas or writing
>notes), it would seem like an area where TeXmacs' could play its strengths
>(quick and convenient math-entry and WYSIWYG which should mean quicker
>turnaround and exploration of design ideas) against LaTeX while not suffering
>much from its weaknesses (not many style-files etc.).
>
>Some other questions: TeXmacs has the "feature" that bold by default results
>in bold-italic in math mode -- is there an easy and covenient way to get bold
>symbols to be nonitalic by default in math mode (complying to the standard
>notation for linear algebra)? By convenient I mean it shouldn't result in 
>more
>work for me then it currently takes to get a bold-italic symbol (pressing 
>f6).
>In a similar vein, but less importantly, it might also be nice to have a bold
>mode that didn't result in bold symbols (as in latex), since that isn't
>typically what one wants.
>
>Another thing: I notice that TeXmacs gets the orientation of some eps files
>wrong (one example was something I generated in inkscape) that are correctly
>displayed by e.g. gv. What can be done to force a certain orientation?
>
>cheers,
>
>'as
>
>
>  
>