mailing-list for TeXmacs Users

["Sam Liddicott" <address@hidden>]

Thanks for taking the time to post this.

I make some comments below based on my own experiences.

On 15/05/11 00:20, Jan.Lellmann wrote:
> ...I think that the upmost priority should be to get the existing code 
> as stable and fast as possible (in particular for large documents), 
> and to get the stylesheet language as solid and as well-documented as 
> possible. Otherwise TeXmacs will never get a substantial user base.

I use TeXmacs for all my programming and technical writing but the sorts 
of difficulties you describe prevent me from recommending it to any of 
my colleagues.

> ...
> 1a) Deleted references: TeXmacs indefinitely remembers references it 
> has once seen. If I create a <label>, reference it using <reference> 
> and then delete the <label>, the reference is unchanged (even after 
> Document > Update > All, multiple times), while it should display "?" 
> instead. This can create very hard-to-spot errors in your document. As 
> a workaround, I manually opened the .tm file and deleted everything in 
> the <\references> and <\auxiliary> sections, which forces TeXmacs to 
> regenerate everything, and searched for "?" in the PDF to check if 
> there are any undefined reference. However, this should never happen 
> in the first place. Moreover, there should be an indicator/warning if 
> there are any undefined references or "cite"s in the document.

I am assured by Joris that <assign|save-aux|false> in the preamble could 
solve this problem by not saving the auxilliary section - however it 
doesn't work for me.

> 1d) Document > Magnification: This is a similarly dangerous item, 
> which should at least issue a warning that it changes the FONT SIZE, 
> i.e. the amount of text that fits on a page. This is very easy to 
> confuse with View > Shrinking factor. If you are required to submit an 
> 11pt document and accidentally mess with the "Magnification" you are 
> in trouble, since TeXmacs will display 11pt font size, but it won't be 
> 11pt in print.

Yes. It probably should be called font-magnification. Shrinking factor 
is more commonly called "zoom" on most other word processors.

> 1g) PDF Export: Embedded raster images (especially black & white) look 
> ugly in the exported PDF. They seem to be compressed as very 
> low-quality JPG, with clearly visible JPEG artifacts especially in 
> purely black/purely white regions. The only workaround is to export as 
> PS and convert to PDF manually using Ghostscript:
>
> gswin32c -sPAPERSIZE=a4 -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -q -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -dSAFER 
> -dPDFX -dPDFSETTINGS=/prepress -dAutoFilterColorImages=false 
> -dColorImageFilter=/FlateEncode -dAutoFilterGrayImages=false 
> -dGrayImageFilter=/FlateEncode -sOutputFile=thesis.pdf -c save pop -f 
> thesis.ps
>
> There should be a menu item to change the "PS to PDF" command, and a 
> better preset.

Or a set of presets.

> 1h) Document > Update: One of the things that annoy me most when using 
> LaTeX is that it doesn't automatically
>  perform another run if it is required in order to get all the 
> references right. However, LaTeX at least issues a warning. Using 
> TeXmacs there is no warning, but the same annoying process of Document 
> * click * Update * click * all * wait * Document * click * Update * 
> click * etc. about 5 times in a row to be sure that all references are 
> up-to-date. In my opinion, TeXmacs should automatically perform as 
> many runs as required so that the labels do not change anymore.

A bug has been filed for this. If I am using papyrus mode it seems that 
I have to export a PS a few times in this update-all process so that 
texmacs canupdate it's idea of pagination.

> 1i) Breaking of inline math: Inline formulas that are wrapped around a 
> line ending are just plain ugly. For this reason LaTeX does not wrap 
> them by default, and issues an "overfull hbox" warning instead. 
> TeXmacs wraps them quietly, which requires to manually check every 
> single line if it contains a silently wrapped inline formula.
>
> 1k) Style files: I use a custom macro package for shortcuts, pretty 
> formatting of algorithms, etc. All documents are in a Subversion 
> repository, so it regularly happens (by an "svn update") that a style 
> file changes without TeXmacs noticing (TeXmacs is not running during 
> the "svn update"). I regularly found TeXmacs marking "undefined 
> macros" in the main document, when they were cleary defined in the 
> package file. It took me about 2 months to figure out that the styles 
> need to be refreshed using "Tools > Update > Styles", and that 
> restarting TeXmacs does NOT help. Why this doesn't happen 
> automatically when TeXmacs is restarted is completely 
> counter-intuitive. However, it may mess up your whole document, or 
> make it use old macros, which both is very dangerous.

It can also be bad if you have a newer copy of a style in the directory 
for one document, but not other documents. If you edit the other 
documents using your .TeXmacs directory installed style, and then edit 
the document with your newer style it ignores the newer style.

> 2) Annoying things
> ------------------
>
> 2a) Stylesheet Language: I had to implement some extensions using the 
> stylesheet language. If one goes one step beyond the standard 
> functionality, TeXmacs crashes at the blink of an eye. I found myself 
> spending about 20% of the time figuring out a solution for a problem, 
> and then spending 80% of the time trying 4 other solutions until I 
> find one that doesn't crash TeXmacs.

same here. I think most people on the mailing list do not write styles 
so there is not much help or advice available.

> While LaTeX can also be incredibly tiresome to work with, it is solid 
> as a rock. I think if TeXmacs aims at production quality and use in 
> professional environment, these issues -- which mostly concern 
> power-users -- desperately need to get fixed. Also, there needs to be 
> a clear documentation of the evaluation order of the document tree. I 
> spent several hours trying to figure out the exact semantics of the 
> various "quote" tags, and eventually gave up.

It took me a few days spead over about half a year but I finally managed 
to understand most of what is going on. It's made harder by the 
difficulty in introspection. The tree macro is quite useful for this. 
With it I was able to find out that the <with> macro encloses the values 
within a <quote> tag. Of course I see why, it helps prevent alternative 
branches in <if> clauses from being evaluated - but without that 
knowledge making sensible us of quote and quasi etc is impossible.

> 2b) Images: I found that the only image type that can be reliably used 
> in Texmcas is EPS written by Ghostscript. PNG tends to crash TeXmacs 
> with a memory overflow when exporting to PS, I found myself finally 
> converting all raster images to EPS in order to get it to work. EPS 
> files written by other applications (e.g. Illustrator) often result in 
> zero-byte .PS files, or .PS files that are truncated at the page that 
> contains the EPS. 

They can look like they are truncated, but running ps2ps on the final 
file can recover them.

> The workaround is to run Ghostscript's "eps2eps" on all .EPS files, 
> which creates .EPS files that TeXmacs doesn't crash on.

Since ghostscript 9 this is not a good idea. Bitmaps get converted into 
rect & fill commands (with ICC colour correction and all that) making 
compression very poor indeed and drawing very slow if you use a lot of 
bitmaps.

There is no real solution to sanitise your eps if you use ghostscript 9 
- other than to use an eps convertor whose files do not need 
sanitising.  Imagemagick's convert seems to work for me.

A future release of ghostscript 9 with have an eps2write target (instead 
of epswrite) which can be used to "sanitise" eps files.

> 2c) Menu Layout: Generally, I found that TeXmacs menus are laid out in 
> the way TeXmacs thinks about the document, not in the way that is most 
> intuitive for the user. For example, inserting a float is done via 
> "Format > Page > Insertion > Floating Object". I think the "Format" 
> menu is the last place that anyone would look, in particular when 
> there is a top-level "Insert" menu. 

That is weird. Tables (figure) are inserted from the insert menu.

> Other examples: Tools > Update menu and Document > Update menu with 
> similar functions but at different places, the same holds for Edit > 
> Preferences > Keyboard and Edit > Preferences > Mathematics > Keyboard.
>
> 2e) Yes/No Dialog: Is there any reason for the cumbersome "yes/no" 
> prompt? Having to backspace away the "no" and type "yes" is very VERY 
> annoying. Even a simple "y"/"n" choice with one keypress would have 
> been more usable. Similarly for the strange Qt "yes/no" dialog with 
> the combobox. This should just use the default yes/no dialog that is 
> provided by all OS and by Qt.

Aye

> 2k) Redraw errors: When I show the whole document (Part > Show all 
> parts), I frequently get redraw errors, where text from the current 
> page and text from a completely different section at the end of the 
> document are draw on top of each other, resulting in garbage text. The 
> workaround is to force a redraw e.g. using "page down" + "page up".

Yes. Even a "refresh" (^L) option would be something.
Another answer is to compile without qt, but then the vector editor 
crashes every time you use it.

> 2l) Zooming: Zooming in and out should be seamless e.g. using 
> Ctrl+scroll wheel, as is standard in most applications, instead of the 
> "View > Shrinking factor" workaround.

Strangely, the shrinking factor does not affect bitmaps inserted into 
documents - which is absolutely crazy. Shrinking factor therefore also 
affects the pagination and PS and PDF output. I am now forced to edit 
all my documents at the original shrinking factor and therefore monitor 
resolution (if I want them to fit on the screen) - or use papyrus which 
has it's own problems in not updating pagination when I do update-all.

> 2m) TeXmacs frequently loses its configuration and displays the 
> "Welcome to your new TeXmacs system" screen.

That will happen each time you run a different version of texmacs to 
last time.

> 3) Performance
> --------------
>
> 3a) Editing anything above about 15 pages in "Paper" mode is just too 
> slow to be usable. 

A non-qt build will be faster.

> A part of the problem is that TeXmacs updates the whole document at 
> every keypress. Since this cannot always be avoided, e.g. when 
> re-wording some sentences in order to get a prettier line wrap, I 
> ended up typing text fragments in an external editor, and copy & 
> pasting them into TeXmacs as a block in order to avoid the update at 
> every keypress. If views the whole document ("Parts > All") and 
> accidentally types a complete word (with, say 10 characters), it is 
> faster to kill TeXmacs, restart it and reload the document than having 
> to wait for the updates.

Yep. I find it crazy madness. I sometimes go off web-browsing while I 
wait for it to catch up. Or if I won't be using the vector editor for 
that document I will rebuild in non-qt mode.

> 3b) Editing paragraphs that contain floats or captions of figures that 
> contain images is incredibly slow, even in very small documents.
>
> 3c) The same holds for the "Papyrus" mode when some floats are 
> present. The unsatisfying workaround is to insert only figures while 
> working with the text, and converting them to floats just before 
> creating the final PDF.

Some of the slowness can be down to your macros. There seems to be some 
optimisation to allow TeXmacs to stop re-formatting the document when it 
can compute that changes will no longer cascade down the document (apart 
from pagination). However this also seems to depend on whether or not 
you are running a qt build and also presumes that the macro name (and 
not arguments) are sufficient to compute this... so if a macro has ever 
rendered a block and then an earler block is changed that uses the 
macro, all later blocks will be re-formatted even if they haven't 
changed. I have a bug-request in so that drd-props can be set to signify 
which macro parameters should also be taken into account in this 
optimisation.

TeXmacs has seen some great improvements since I started using it but it 
still has some very sharp edges.

Sam