mailing-list for TeXmacs Users

[Henri Lesourd <address@hidden>]

Yuliang Wang wrote:

> Hello, the dear authors of TeXmacs,
>
> First of all, thank you for producing this fantastic software! I have 
> been looking for a WYSIWYG math doc editor for a long time, and your 
> software realizes my dream. It's like editing directly on the paper.
We are happy that you found our work useful. A little
thing : if you post a question that could be interesting
for other people as well, post on the list, as I just do.


> Here are some questions in my mind for some time:
>
> 1. A specific question: In the math mode, I can't get "u_{tt}" or 
> anything similar to that, because the two t's will automatically 
> become text instead of math font. That feature is useful when I want 
> math operators like max, lim or Re, but sometimes we do use 
> multiple-letter math variables. Is that feature configurable in the 
> current version of TeXmacs?
Probably, although I don't know how to do this
specific thing. In any case, you can always achieve
exactly what you want by means of directly editing
the markup, as explained in, e.g. :
http://www.ags.uni-sb.de/~henri/texmacs/aTeXmacsTutorial.pdf


> 2. A basic question: In the math mode, one use the right arrow key to 
> leave the current environment. But I think it's much better to replace 
> it by the space bar, it's simply more convenient and natural for 
> typing equations. Is that configurable?
Yes, you can reprogram the keys to perform the operation
you want. You need to walk a little bit through the TeXmacs
code, in order to find exactly the chunk of code performed
by the arrows in math mode, and re-assign it to the space
key in math mode.


> 3. The user interface is really not so convenient. For example, when I 
> want to set the margins, I need repeatedly click the menu to find the 
> "Odd page left margin", "Odd page right margin", etc. It would be much 
> better if there is a dialog in which I can set all the margin values 
> in one time.
We are working on improving the dialogs, but it will not
be finished quickly, we need some months.


> 3. A more basic question: TeXmacs integrates and can exports LaTex, 
> but why is it NOT BASED on LaTeX? I am not an expert in computer 
> language, but I think this software would become more powerful and 
> popular if it is based on LaTex, since most users will use it for 
> typing scientific reports and papers.
This is of course because LaTeX, and especially the
underlying language TeX  are as a matter of fact absolutely
crappy languages : TeX is a turing-complete langage.

The file format & macro language of TeXmacs are
modern, XML-like languages, designed from the
very beginning to be clean.