mailing-list for TeXmacs Users

[Pablo Angulo <address@hidden>]

Hola!

Te copio-y-pego un email que llegó a la lista hace unos meses, de un
tipo que acababa de escribir su tesis con texmacs. Yo estoy en la misma
tesitura y casi que me inclino por escribir los capítulos por separado y
pasarlo a latex cuando termine:

> I just finished a major project (thesis) using TeXmacs, and I wanted
> to share some experiences. The project has about 200 pages and 40
> floats. I have been using TeXmacs for several years now, and until now
> regularly used TeXmacs for the "draft" phase of various documents (for
> which it really shines), and used LaTeX for the final typesetting.
> However, this time I chose to use TeXmacs from the beginning to the
> end. I found myself developing so many workaround that I thought I'd
> share them, in case anyone wants to take a similar path, and so that
> maybe Joris (or someone else who knows the sources) can fix some of
> the bugs.
>
> Don't get me wrong, I like TeXmacs, and it works very well for small
> documents. However, I think TeXmacs can only compete with LaTeX if it
> provides a solid stable foundation that users and publishers can
> depend on. While LaTeX needs a huge amount of work in order to get an
> acceptable workflow, when correctly set up it is rock solid. TeXmacs
> is easy to get used to, but extremely crashy when trying to do
> non-basic operations. With hindsight, I have to say that had I known
> all the problems I have encountered, I had probably chosen LaTeX, from
> which I know that it is hard to get used to, but it is stable. It is
> very frustrating having to deal with mysterious crashes and figuring
> out workarounds close to the deadline.
>
> Currently it seems that new features are added all the time, such as
> the vector graphics editor. In my opinion TeXmacs has more than enough
> innovative features and flexibility by now to beat any other
> scientific editor, but long-term usability is just bad. With respect
> to the list below, 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.
>
> That said, this is the list. It is organized in three parts: dangerous
> things than can ruin the output by silently introducing errors,
> annoying things that are just counter-intuitive or take a lot of time
> getting used to, and performance issues that are relevant when editing
> large documents. I loosely ordered the items in order of descending
> importance.
>
> 1) Dangerous things
> -------------------
>
> 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.
>
> 1b) .tm~ Files: By default, the "File > Load" (BTW, why not "Open"?)
> dialog shows all file types (in fact there is no option to restrict it
> to TeXmacs files, e.g. .tm + .ts). In particular, it shows the .tm
> files side by side with their .tm~ files. It is very easy to mis-click
> the .tm~ file, which in an unfortunate setting may mean that you lose
> all of your work. TeXmacs should either not allow to open .tm~ files
> at all, hide them by default, or at least issue a warning when the
> user tries to open one.
>
> 1c) Page Setup: There are two places where the page size can be set:
> Under File > Page Setup and under Document > Page > Size. At the
> least, the menu should be called "Print setup". Such things sound like
> minor issues, but anyone will FIRST find the prominent "Page setup"
> menu, change the size there, and assume that it did the trick, when
> all that is changed is the print setup. This issue alone cost me 15
> hours of re-breaking the whole document close to the deadline.
>
> 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.
>
> 1e) Consistency: I do not know how exactly, but I managed to get two
> installations of TeXmacs 1.0.7.10 that work exactly the same, except
> that in one copy the *bold* fonts (and only those) are a tiny bit
> wider. Therefore headings (and figures for captions) wrap differently.
> I have no idea if the font was changed recently or if the issue is
> caused by the setup, but in order to be exchangeable TeXmacs should
> make absolutely sure that documents look 100% the same when compiled
> on different systems (maybe use a checksum on the font files?). This
> one took me one day to figure out.
>
> 1f) Sums & Integrals: There seems to have been a semantic change with
> respect to sums and integrals, which are now considered as "functions"
> (i.e. they have an argument), rather than just a symbol. This
> introduced a nasty behavior: If one creates an integral (say
> <big-around|<int>|<rsub|0><rsub|1>xyz>), puts the cursor at the end
> and presses "backspace" in order to delete the x, the <int> sign at
> the front is deleted instead! This is actually very easy to miss if
> you press "backspace" multiple times, e.g. in order to delete multiple
> characters, and corrupts the formulas. Instead, the last character
> should be deleted.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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. 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.
>
> 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. The workaround is to run Ghostscript's "eps2eps" on
> all .EPS files, which creates .EPS files that TeXmacs doesn't crash on.
>
> 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. 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.
>
> 2d) Bugs when using parts: There is an ugly bug when working with
> parts that causes TeXmacs to reproducibly crash at harmless actions
> such as selecting text across a chapter boundary (see my previous
> posts on this list).
>
> 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.
>
> 2f) Extensible brackets: With the automatic extensible brackets there
> was apparantly introduced a bug: When extensible brackets are turned
> off (Edit > Preferences > Keyboard > Mathematics > Use extensible
> brackets), I am unable to insert extensible brackets anymore, even
> using the toolbox icon ("Insert large delimiter"). On the other hand,
> if I turn extensible brackets on, I cannot type left angles anymore
> ("<" + 5x TAB), it just displays as "<left-<langle>-0>". I ended up
> copy & pasting either the large brackets or the angles each time I
> needed them.
>
> 2g) Editing large documents: TeXmacs should be able to view separate
> parts of a document in different windows. Currently this is not
> possible, which makes creating references in large documents very
> slow: Switch to other part * wait * look up label * Switch back to
> current part * wait * insert label. The same holds for copy & pasting.
> Editing the whole document in one window is too slow.
>
> 2h) Search: The search function needs a window, which should be
> non-modal. A very common task is to search for all occurrences of a
> text and change something close to that text which cannot be automated
> (for example search for all "TODO" and remove them, fix them, or
> ignore them). The problem is that after typing something, the
> (apparently undocumented) "Search next" shortcut (F3) does not work
> anymore, and one has to type Ctrl+F + the whole search phrase again,
> every single time. The layout for the "Search" dialog box is be quite
> standard by now (at least on Windows systems): "Match Case",
> "Up/Down", "Find Next", "Cancel". The same holds for the "Search &
> Replace" function.
>
> 2i) Windows Version: I couldn't get the Windows version to compile, I
> ended up installing TeXmacs under Ubuntu in a VirtualBox VM, and using
> a shared folder to access the .tm files on the Windows drive.
>
> 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".
>
> 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.
>
> 2m) TeXmacs frequently loses its configuration and displays the
> "Welcome to your new TeXmacs system" screen.
>
> 3) Performance
> --------------
>
> 3a) Editing anything above about 15 pages in "Paper" mode is just too
> slow to be usable. 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.
>
> 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.
>