mailing-list for TeXmacs Users

["David G. Wonnacott" <address@hidden>]

Hi everybody,

Just a quick note to let you know that I can confirm that preparing a
document via TeXmacs and printing/publishing it on lulu.com is quite
straightforward. I just printed up a document I use for my upper-level
applied CS courses, and it looks very nice, with very little effort.

The body of the document was entirely material entered in TeXmacs,
without embedded postscript/PDF/whatever, so I can't say much about
how that would work (but plan to try it in the coming summer with my
much larger set of notes for introductory CS). I did use math mode,
tables, floating figures, etc., with no problems. (Since one just
uploads the PDF to Lulu, all the tricky formatting is done by TeXmacs
rather than Lulu). I had already installed the Type 1 fonts for
TeXmacs; things might have been more difficult without these.

The one thing that was difficult is the requirement that the front and
back cover be images rather than PDF files. I created two separate
TeXmacs documents (one actually included an embedded postscript), and
printed these to PDF, and then used GIMP to turn PDF into PNG (at 300
DPI, which I think was recommended by lulu.com). This generally looked
good, but the back cover had some text in 6-point Palatino font, and
that ended up looking really blocky (despite selecting "strong" text
anti-aliasing) in GIMP; I played around with converting at 1200 DPI
and shrinking by 4x, but it still didn't look good, so I just switched
back to the default font and that was fine.

In summary, the biggest hurdle to going from TeXmacs to Lulu is the
elevation of one's own standards (perhaps not a bad thing).  Given
that I already had Type 1 fonts installed, I'd say that it took well
under an hour to go from "I think I'll try putting this on lulu.com"
to being able to order copies from them. The subsequent process of "if
this is going to look officially printed, I should check the spelling,
layout, etc. before I actually order it" took quite a bit longer :-)


Dave Wonnacott

Disclaimer: I certainly benefit indirectly from being able to use
TeXmacs and Lulu to make my notes look cool, but have no financial or
other direct interest in either one.