Chronological Thread 

< Chronological >      < Thread >

---

Anderson Brasil wrote:

I am having trouble trying to learn texmacs. I have printed on paper the user manual and looked for a few tutorials on the net, so I could learn at least the very basic facts. After having decided to fully imigrate to texmacs, and started to writing slightly more sofisticated documents, I got stuck. And the help menu didn't help me at all.
Let me show an example: at this very moment, I am trying to insert a picture in a document. So I loaded the picture on it by choosing INSERT/IMAGE/INSERT IMAGE on the menu (actually it didn't worked when my picture was at PGN format but it was easier to convert it to EPS than to find out what the problem is). But the picture was too big, so I need to reduce its side. But there is no way how to do it, at least not a way I could find. I tried typing F1 and search for "resize image" and found a page man-images.en.tm when I can read:
"(...) By default, images are displayed at their design size. The following operations are supported on images:
1) Clipping the images following a rectangle. The lower left corner of the default image is taken as the origin for specifying a rectangle for clipping.
2) Resizing an image. When specifying a new width, but no height at the
prompt (or vice versa), the image is resized so as to preserve the aspect
ration.
3) Magnifying the image. An alternative way to resize an image, by
multiplying the width and the height by a constant.
(...)"

It says that the feature do exists, but do not tell me how to do it, so it isn't useful at all. It is just a small example about the kind of dificulty I am having.

There are lots of features that are not implemented in the user interface.

The key to these problems is editing the markup directly : this way,
you can do **whatever you want**, you directly change the encoding
of the underlying document. As far as your example about resizing
an image is concerned, if you switch to source mode by means
of Document->View->Edit source tree, your image appears
as, for example :
[[
<postscript|file:///home/henri/Scripts/desertAurora.jpg|*5/8|*5/8||||>
]]

Then, the only thing you need to do is to change the two "*5/8"
to something else (e.g. "*3/8"). If you play a little bit, you will
quicky discover that (among other things), the first second parameter
of the <postscript|...> markup encodes the width, and the third one
the height.

In TeXmacs, everything is made by means of markup similar
to the <postscript|...> in the example above. A more detailed
introduction to TeXmacs can be found at :
[[
http://www.ags.uni-sb.de/~henri/texmacs/aTeXmacsTutorial.pdf
]]

The texmac developer(s) is making a really good job on this, but I still think that the interface need be more polished. With a little bit of patience, a not very dumb person can learn how to do anything using microsoft word (or openoffice), but it doens't happen here on texmacs. At least simple common tasks should have a graphic and obvious interface, like actions on graphics or turning on/off pagenumbering (another thing I can't do) and stuff like that. Another problematic thing about learning texmacs is the keyboard shortcut used. Windows users (who are 95% of computer users) and most linux users (like myself) are so used to type CTRL-Z when they need to undo things that they do automatically. At texmacs it is replaced by another keyboard shortcut. Actually, all the behaviour of the editor is very diferent from what most text editors do (i couldn't tell how many times I did erased almost the whole document because I've clicked with the mouse's cursor - trying to set the mouse's cursor in a certain position as I am used to - and then pressed backspace to erase a single caracter).

Changing this is clearly one of our priorities, but its a lot of
work. One of the problem is there are still, e.g. lots of things
that are hardcoded in the source code, we need first to abstract
and modularize better the code of TeXmacs. This task is a
ongoing task, of which some subgoals are on the tasklist for
this year (improving the widgets & menus).

On the other hand, I disagree a little bit about your idea that
a "not very dumb" person would discover the interface easily.

You should rather say that a "Windows familiar" person can
discover easily the interface of the apps, because there is a
lot of reuse (e.g. : Ctrl-Z). But knowing the Windows conventions
has absolutely nothing to do with being dumb or intelligent.

Similarly, emacs-familiar people learn TeXmacs easily, because
as a matter of fact, TeXmacs reuses the conventions of emacs.

I used to teach using computers to very different kinds of
people, and in my opinion, this idea that Windows helps
people, or that it would be "more intuitive", etc., is just
plain false, in fact it's pure marketing : you see clearly
this in computer-illiterate people : they really **do not**
understand Windows before they catch some metaphors
which enable them to interpret the behaviour of the
machine. But learn them the UNIX, or the Mac metaphors
instead, they will learn as easily.

As a matter of fact, as for me, I hate these emacs keyboard
shortcuts ;-), and I really wait for the time when everything
will be completely configureable (although with some patience,
you can already do some things by means of (kbd-map)s).

But on the other hand, I am not sure at all that Windows is
the pinnacle of computer science...

By the way "Edit->Preferences->Look and feel" could
perhaps help your Ctrl-Z problem... (you need to exit
and restart TeXmacs before the changes take effect).

Two final observations:
1) I am senting those criticisms about the dificulty of learning texmacs expecting to contribute to make it better, by pointing out what I think is a major problem about this. I think that the program is great. The idea is exceptionally good, it just need some polishing.
2) In this list I see a lot of people who knows how to do almost "esoteric" things, so they somehow have learned it. So I am asking what is the best way to learn it. How to find the answers when you got stuck in the middle of a document? (most usually, when you need urgently to finish it).

The thing is that these people know the trick with the markup.
This way, they can invent their own "esoteric" things. You can
find a (quasi) exhaustive help in Help->Reference guide (look
especially in the section "TeXmacs primitives").

---

• Observations about the learning of texmacs, Anderson Brasil, 12/07/2006
  • Re: [TeXmacs] Observations about the learning of texmacs, Henri Lesourd, 12/07/2006
    • Re: [TeXmacs] Observations about the learning of texmacs, Anderson Brasil, 12/09/2006
      • Re: [TeXmacs] Observations about the learning of texmacs, Kamaraju Kusumanchi, 12/09/2006
      • Dimensions of the page, richardetdave, 12/14/2006
        • Re: [TeXmacs] Dimensions of the page, Kamaraju Kusumanchi, 12/14/2006

---

Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.19.