mailing-list for TeXmacs Users

[Henri Lesourd <address@hidden>]

Bear F. Braumoeller wrote:

> Hello all,
>
> I'm responding to the requests for feedback on your website.  I've 
> just spent the afternoon installing and working with TeXmacs, and I 
> have to say, I'm very impressed!  For a long time, I have wished for a 
> simple LaTeX editor that would let me work directly with the text, 
> rather than forcing me to plod through lines and lines of code.  I 
> hadn't realized that TeXmacs existed, and I was very excited to get a 
> chance to try it out.  Thank you, very much, for putting so much time 
> into such an impressive product.
>
> I doubt that I will end up being able to use it, unfortunately, for 
> the simple reason that doing so would involve a massive citation 
> re-formatting effort that would require far too much time.  Let me 
> explain, in the hopes that this will be of some use to you.
>
> When I first succeeded in getting citations to work, I ran into the 
> same problem that Javier Arantegui did in this exchange on your list:
>
>      http://lists.texmacs.org/wws/arc/texmacs-users/2004-10/msg00036.html
>
> I recognized the problem, however, because I've run into it in LaTeX 
> before.  I use chicago.bst, but in order to make it work properly I 
> must load chicago.sty at the beginning of the document.  The 
> chicago.sty file redefines many citation and bibliography entries, so 
> that they look correct when they are printed.  Without it, chicago.bst 
> creates terrible-looking entries in both the citations and the 
> bibliography.  (I have attached a copy, in case you are curious about 
> exactly what it does.)
>
> With chicago.sty, I can use commands like \citeN[123]{foo99} to get 
> Foo (1999, 123), or \cite[123]{foo99} to get (Foo 1999, 123), 
> or \citeNP[123]{foo99} to get Foo 1999, 123 -- you get the idea.  And 
> the bibliography is formatted just as political science editors want 
> it to be, in particular, without bibliography labels.  There are some 
> other packages that do similar things, but all of them require some 
> sort of .sty file at the beginning:  at a minimum, they 
> need \def\@biblabel#1{} in order to get rid of the bibliography 
> labels.  My guess is that the need for some sort of .sty file at the 
> beginning will be very common for social scientists, actually.
It's true that in your case, one probably needs to redefine some
predefined TeXmacs macros (e.g. \cite{}), although I'm not even
sure that since 2004, things didn't changed in a way which would
obviate this (recurrent) problem of using different bibTeX styles.

This being said, it should be noted that bibTeX is wholly reused
as a full component of the TeXmacs software : it means that quite
often, as a matter of fact, problems with formatting the bib entries
are to be solved at the level of bibTeX, they often have nothing
to do with redefining/adapting TeXmacs itself. This comes in
stark contrast to the connection with LaTeX, whose functionnality
is reimplemented from scratch in the TeXmacs rendering
engine : thus currently, we use 0% of LaTeX inside
TeXmacs (except for the fonts, although one can use
only Type 1 fonts, and thus become completely independent
of this part of LaTeX, too).


> I don't even think that I understand the LaTeX style file all that 
> well, let alone how I could re-render it as TeXmacs!  The only thing 
> that comes to mind is a LaTeX-to-TeXmacs style file conversion 
> program, which I would think (?) would be straightforward, given that 
> TeXmacs imports LaTeX files, but I have no idea whether the style file 
> syntaxes are even remotely comparable.
Automatically translating LaTeX style files seems easy at first, but it 
appears
that it is a quite difficult problem, because of the need of also importing
the pure TeX commands that can be found in lots of LaTeX style files.

The TeX language being a quite low-level language, it is hard to translate
it in a high-level language like the TeXmacs macro language.

What we would need in order to increase the speed of spreading TeXmacs
would be a (handmade)  TeXmacs implementation of each one of the
common LaTeX style files (especially the ones from the publishers).

And for this we need volunteers !

This being said, to my knowledge (correct me if I'm wrong) purely syntactic
LaTeX macros (i.e., the ones which define a purely syntactic macro 
expansion)
that can be found in the preamble of a LaTeX document definitely **can** be
imported in TeXmacs.


> I always tell my students that, when they raise problems, they should 
> also be willing to offer solutions.  In this case, I fear that I don't 
> know enough about your program to offer any intelligent solutions.  I 
> suppose it might be possible to convert chicago.sty over to a TeXmacs 
> style file, but I took a look at the "writing your own style file" 
> page, and frankly, it's quite daunting. 

It should not be so complex, because TeXmacs macro language is exactly 
similar to
purely functional s-expressions, thus some basic knowledge about Lisp or 
functional
languages should kick-start you very easily.

Perhaps the following tutorial:
<<
http://www.ags.uni-sb.de/~henri/texmacs/aTeXmacsTutorial.pdf
>>

, which exclusively proceeds by means of examples you can do by
yourself while reading the tutorial, would fit your needs better.

I would be pleased to hear more news / opinions from you about that, because
as far as non-"hard science" people (i.e., maths / physics / computer 
science
people), are concerned, we suspect since quite a long time now that our
tutorials are perhaps not completely adapted, they are perhaps still a 
little
bit too much in the boring style of the UNIX man (i.e., "read everything and
forget nothing, otherwise you can't understand") . Thus, any hint / info 
in this
respect would be very useful (although the next problem, then, would become
finding the time to do the job of improving the tutorials : but the 1st 
step is to
know what to do).


As usual, any other comments / criticisms / dialectic points of view are
hotly welcomed.