mailing-list for TeXmacs Users

[Paul Zarucki <address@hidden>]

Hi,

I too I am a Texmacs beginner. I sympathise with JC Bustamante and would like to help make Texmacs more accessible to non-geeks and newcomers. It is a wonderful piece of software that deserves much wider recognition. I feel the same is true of much open source software - it is very good but the tutorials often assume an above-average level of expertise on the part of the reader and this deters many people from using it.

As time permits, I hope to write some Texmacs tutorials for beginners like us, once I have learned a bit more about Texmacs! I'll e-mail this list when I have more to report.

Paul.

JC Bustamante wrote: Hi all,

I'm a "basic user" if texmacs. I really like this program although I'm not still able to do everything I would like to. I still need to use the good old LaTeX sometimes, and Lyx less frequently. I'm a mathematician, teacher at a university in Ecuador. I try to encourage my students to use open source programs, and, ouf course, TeXmacs is one of my favourites. My computer-science skills are not great, when come the time to "compile" programs, things go bad for me. Some one compiled a recent version of TeXmacs for me, but he did it in the wrong place, so I can't use the maxima interface, for instance. I use Ubuntu 8.04, and I know that the versions in the repositories are too old... I posted at the Ubuntu forums complaining about that, but I can't do better... sorry! I find the download page's instructions helpless, I'm simply not qualified to use that information. I frequently post (answering or asking) to many other forums, but I find that this one is the most "by-geeks-for-geeks" I've encountered.
Some simple issues, at least I think they are simple, that keep me using LyX or LaTeX form time to time are:

pstricks. I've posted before, without any sucess. The answer I've got was not helpfull, for it was addressed to someone with much higher computer science skills that mine. I thank the guy who wrote to me, but, sorry, it wasn't helpfull.

xymatrix. Same thing.

Defining shortucts/commands. I kow there is something about that in the manuals, but again... Have someone thought about making a "basic Texmacs for LaTeX users guide"?

On the other hand, I could help in the translation to spanish. There are still some parts of the manual which are in English.

As I said before, I really like this program, I would like to help getting more people using it, but it's hard to do...

Regards,

JC