mailing-list for TeXmacs Users

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

Hi all,

I'm once again doing my annual release of TeXmacs-produced documents
on lulu.com (so far, easier this year than last), and thought I'd
share my latest thoughts about this process, and some other thoughts
about TeXmacs (below).



**** Thoughts About Fonts Not Embedded in PDF Files ****

A few minor discoveries eased the production of the particular flavor
of PDF that lulu.com (and some others) like --- the biggest challenge
here has consistently been getting a document completely free of
references to fonts that are not embedded (I believe I wrote to the
email list about this last year).

The first step is, of course, to use Type 1 fonts. This is even easier
on our linux machines this year --- my students didn't have to do
anything special (perhaps they are now distributed by default when
Ubuntu installs TeXmacs?).

Several subsequent steps were needed last year, to deal with things
like embedded figures such as .fig files produced by xfig or .eps
files from gnuplot. This year's realizations:

  * switching to .svg files edited by inkscape (rather than .fig files
    from xfig) is easy (just save as .svg in a current version of
    xfig), and .svg files in TeXmacs documents don't create the same
    sort of "font not included" problems that the .fig files did. This
    is much nicer than my old approach (perhaps it was "use transfig
    to produce a .eps and then include that"?).

  * gnuplot can be asked not to embed the font it uses, and this works
    (e.g., via

           set terminal postscript eps font "NimbusSanL-Regu" fontfile 
"/usr/share/texmf-texlive/fonts/type1/urw/helvetic/uhvr8a.pfb"

    ). Note that I was not impressed by the .svg export of gnuplot,
    in that it wouldn't open properly in inkscape or TeXmacs (though
    I'm not sure whose fault this is), and also I never could figure
    out how to get .svg or .png output to use grayscale rather than
    color.

With these two changes, I quickly got a lulu-suitable PDF (for
example, see http://www.lulu.com/content/7469213, but note that
unfortunately lulu.com does not seem to have a nice way to send a book
cover as a PDF rather than an image file).




**** A Couple Other Thoughts About TeXmacs ****

 * Version Control *

This year saw my first attempt at multi-author work in TeXmacs. I
think a (few?) years ago I saw an email about connections of TeXmacs
to an existing version control system (CVS?), but a current google
search of "texmacs version control" doesn't indicate anything about
this being done --- in fact, the top hit in this search (which was
http://www.texmacs.org/tmweb/about/plans.en.html ) shows "Version
Control" in the google search, but this text does not appear on the
web page itself. Has this feature been abandoned? That would be
distressing, as support for multi-author document is #1 on my TeXmacs
wish list. At least "A native spreadsheet and tools for collaborative
authoring are planned for later" still remains in the online manual at
http://www.texmacs.org/tmweb/manual/webman-about.en.html.


 * Support for Included Images/Spreadsheets/etc in TeXmacs Documents *

As noted above, I imported a number of figures from .svg into
TeXmacs. (I've not tried the native TeXmacs document editor, and don't
have any strong feeling about it, but I'm familiar with inkscape as
sometimes I need to edit figures outside of TeXmacs, e.g. .svg files
for wikibooks.org).

It seems to me that a couple of simple things could be done to improve
support for included images, etc.:

    * I am unable to find any easy way to tell TeXmacs that I've
      edited the .svg file online, to have TeXmacs load the new
      version and re-format my document with it. Perhaps I've
      overlooked something simple (apologies if so), but it seems to
      me this ought to be easy (like refreshing a bibliography).

    * Another should-be-easy tweak would be to allow double-clicking
      or some pop-up menu option to automatically fire-up an external
      editor on the linked file (e.g., for .svg files, start inkscape,
      or some editor set in TeXmacs preference, or best of all
      whatever is chosen by gnome-open on linux or "open" on MacOS).

This approach might also be part of an easier way to embed
spreadsheets in a document, though of course communication of values
in the TeXmacs document into the spreadsheet would be tricky ---
despite being a many-decades fan of emacs, I'm more a fan of "a tool
for each job" than the "one tool to rule them all" philosophy. I'm
very happy with the support for many different computer algebra
systems in TeXmacs, for example, and perhaps this would be a good
model for building a connection to something like OpenOffice
spreadsheets or gnumeric (or best of all some widely-supported
XML-based file that describes a spreadsheet and view thereof).

It's really too bad there isn't some standard way for applications to
share an image being displayed in an X11 window or generated in a PDF
document. This whole "one application per window" thing really works
against the "a tool for each job" philosophy, but that's a rant for
another day.



To anyone who has bothered to read this far, thanks for your patience.
To anyone else, don't complain, since you can (and did) easily just
stop reading.

Dave Wonnacott