mailing-list for TeXmacs Users

[Joris van der Hoeven <address@hidden>]

Hi David,

On Wed, Aug 05, 2009 at 11:59:22AM -0400, David G. Wonnacott wrote:
> 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).

Thanks for your comments. Several of the points you have raised
are currently being worked on, or planned for soon: version control,
font reorganization, etc. However, we have to respect a bit of order
in order not to mess up everything. For instance, a working Qt version
comes before a thorought font reorganization. Better image support
will probably follow more or less automatically when switching to Qt.

Best wishes, Joris

> **** 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