mailing-list for TeXmacs Users

[Henri Lesourd <address@hidden>]

> Hi there,
>
> I've just tried to get my feet wet with the new graphics mode, and I have a 
> couple of points that I would like to raise. (For reference: Using the 
> 1.0.5.12 binary on Debian sid.)
>
> - Visible grid vs. Printed grid. 
>
> If I turn on a visible grid for editing, that grid is also printed (and 
> exported to PDF). That's not what I want. I want the grid on screen as an 
> editing help, but not on paper. Maybe there should be a separate "printed 
> grid" option, if that is feasible. Ideally, that non-printed grid would also 
> vanish once I move the focus away from the drawing.
>
>  
Currently, the idea is to add a feature that you could use to
set the visual grid on and off. If we decide to do more (i.e.,
the edit grid is invisible in the Postscript output), then it
raises the question of what to do in the opposite cases, when
you want the grid to be printed.

As far as interface is concerned, a boolean toggle would
probably be a good approach (something like "Visual grid
appears on printout [Y/N]").

On the other hand, disabling the visual grid when the document
is printed (and if this visual grid is not of the kind "appears
on printout") is not very difficult to do.

> - Graphics box sizing
>
> When I draw something in Xfig, the resulting .eps automatically shrink-wraps 
> around what I have drawn. Thus, centering this graphics box is really easy. 
I don't understand what you mean : if the resulting .eps automatically
shrink wraps, there is no need (and no way) to center the graphics at
all...

> Ideally, I would like the built-in graphics mode to emulate that behavior, at 
> least as an option. I know that I can set the size of the graphics box by 
> hand and translate the content around inside, but I find that quite 
> cumbersome.
I don't see clearly what you mean, here.

One thing I did some time ago was to adjust the size of the page
in order to output a document that contains exactly the graphics,
thus the document is in fact an image (and then this image was
used in a LaTeX document). Do you mean something like this ?

> - Interface
>
> While I can see the reasoning behind Henri's
It's me & Joris, to be precise :-)

> reinvented drawing program UI 
> using different mouse buttons, I'm having trouble getting used to it. 
> Providing an interface that is more like the "accepted standard" (as in 
> Inkscape, Corel Draw, Word, OpenOffice, etc.) would certainly ease the 
> transition to TeXmacs graphics for many.
This comment has been done already. So perhaps should
we think about providing a double-sided editing interface,
the current one, and another one that would be closer to
the usual standard, then.

But is it that you have trouble using it because you
are very much used to the usual standard, or it is
because there are design problems with this kind of
interface (i.e., things difficult to do).

> The Xfig interface, while 
> non-standard, is affected by this only to a lesser degree because there is 
> always the box that explains what each mouse button does.
>
>  
That is something missing in TeXmacs, but to improve this,
we would need to look at improving the widgets ; this is
not infeasible (and will probably happen somehow, at some
point), but it raises lots of other issues, in particular
because it is also related to the question of the toolkits
we could decide to use in the future (and then, we are not
completely free anymore to decide exactly the kind of widgets
we want, because these kinds of widgets should be implementable
using most of the available toolkits).

So this is clearly a problem that we should
probably see later.

> - Default graph settings
>
> I would like to have a place where I can set a few defaults that I will find 
> in any drawing that I start, pertaining to grid size, properties and such.
>
>  
To be looked at, then. In effect, having some kind of "default context"
available in the interface for new stuff is an interesting feature.
Indeed, it could appear to be more general need than something that
is only related to graphics.