mailing-list for TeXmacs Users

[Henri Lesourd <address@hidden>]

Luca wrote:

> Last time it happened to me (around December 2005) Henri suggested 
> that it was a problem related to the pdf  dialect produced by gnuplot 
> on a Mac. 

It seems that TeXmacs has problem with recent / a little bit
non standard versions of Pdf files.


> Now I have an eps file produced on a Linux box by Xfig. 

It seems that this eps file is not correct / not correctly
understood by TeXmacs. The solution to your problem is
to clean it by means of the 'eps2eps' command, for example :
<<
/home/henri>eps2eps box.eps box2.eps
/home/henri>_
>>

And then, use 'box2.eps' instead of 'box.eps' in your .tm file.


But this remains a workaround around the current bug. There are two
possible reasons to this bug :

a) The eps dialect generated by Xfig is not completely clean (which
  is possible, if your version of Xfig is recent) ;

b) The eps dialect generated by Xfig is more recent than the one
  understood by TeXmacs (which is the most probable given the
  current informations) ;
  

> So summarizing I think it is a very malicious bug, 

Yes, it is really annoying, because we somehow depend on what
other software do, and must probably update TeXmacs to have
it understand more recent dialects of eps, pdf, etc.


> It make me feel insecure whenever I have to write something serious that
> 1) I won't  be able to print it
> 2) I won't  be able to export  and send my work to other people that 
> don't use Texmacs. 

You can (and should) **check** that the exported .pdf or .ps
file can be correctly viewed in Ghostview.

Don't trust the computer ! This is a general part of the knowhow
of computer users that is not likely to cease being useful in a
foreseeable future... (of course, it doesn't change the fact that
software with less bugs is better ;-).


> This is not exactly the feeling one should have when using a WYSIWYG 
> editor isn' t it?

No. The fact is that we rely (perhaps a little bit too much ?) on
TeXmacs users have some skills in hacking and using UNIX commands.

On the other hand, it is important to observe that in most of other
WYSIWYG editors, which rely either on binary formats, or on unreadable
XML dialects (in this latter case, the situation remains crappy, but
not completely hopeless), when one file is corrupted, you loose all
your content, with really, very few hopes of recovering your work.

If you use TeXmacs, when such problems occur, there is always a
way to recover most of your work by hacking a little bit the markup,
whether it is from inside TeXmacs, or from inside emacs, for the
more severe cases.


> Proposed Solutions and work around:
> 1) find out the bug. (I am sorry but I am not skilled enough to do this) 

We will have to solve it, for sure.


> 2) Using the graphic package of Texmacs (This is not  my case as for 
> me the package is unusable do to slowness and unresposivness of the 
> cursor inside the graphic environement. I had already commented on 
> this issue on  a previous message on the list) 

It depends if the root cause of the slowness is your computer or if it is
because you tried the graphics package in a time when speed problems were
not well solved (I remember that it took some struggle to find a way to 
improve
this sufficiently well). The TeXmacs version you are using is a very recent
one, perhaps should you try the graphics package again, just to see if, 
perhaps,
it would work correctly now...


> 3) getting a way to check if the figure will appear in the final 
> output and warn.
> The manual way is the one I used that is export to pdf each time you 
> include graphic to check...
> (At least one could save a lot of time switching immediatly to latex) 

This is very easy : do File->Export, and then look at your file
with Ghostview or Acrobat reader.

But I understand that with a big file, this is not practical : you
would have to remove bit after bit, till you discover which part
of the document is the offending one (this is indeed the general
method one can use to diagnose bugs in TeXmacs files).


> Hope this helps and thank you for the effort to improve Texmacs. 

Anyway, thank you for having took care of sending this
mail, it will appropriately remind us that perfection
is not yet reached, and that in order to start the long,
long way which allows to reach it, we could start (why
not ?), by solving this bug :-)...


Best, Henri