mailing-list for TeXmacs Users

[Peter Rapčan <address@hidden>]

Hi list,

Please find below my responses.

On Mar 1, 2012, at 8:30 PM, Alvaro Tejero Cantero wrote:

> Dear TeXmacs users,
> 
> Tomorrow is the final day of the TeXmacs workshop.
> 
> A few important issues will be discussed in a dedicated session. Joris
> has put forward a questionnaire to guide the discussion. To sample the
> wishes, interests and ideas of TeXmacs users we would welcome the
> opinion of all of you who could not make it to Faro.
> 
> Here are the questions*:
> 
> ! What would you like to happen with TeXmacs?
> * three most important point
> * then summarize in just one
> 
1.  To work with Mathematica (also) under Mac OS X out of the box.
2.  To evolve to something like Wofram Researche's CDF format/software - 
maybe having a possibility of tecmacs being a front-end for it?
3.  To be more user-friendly/efficient (autocompletion with drop-down lists 
of options in addition to cycling through options, unified labeling - e.g. 
why labels are at different place for equation and for equations?, the 
contextual status/menu bar is sometimes too contextual - even when in an 
equation, one often wants to navigate to a different chapter, however, the 
chapters drop-down list is not present when the cursor is inside equation 
environment, )

One most important: do not bloat texmacs too much (it does not need to be a 
spreadsheet editor, editor for images, etc. It only needs to have a good 
interface for embedding such objects and seamlessly calling external editing 
programs)

> ! What are the most important bugs?
> * three bugs
> * one bug
1. Bibliography does not work with relative path to the bib file. Very 
inconvenient for collaboration (every collaborator needs to have the (always 
changing) bib file in the same absolute path or change the path all the 
time). In general bibliography stuff is very non-intuitive and not 
user-friendly in texmacs.
2.  (English) spell check stops once a unicode non-english character is 
encountered. To continue, one has to select the text AFTER the problematic 
character. Then spell check continues until next such character is 
encountered.
3.  Under Mac OS X, upon opening an existing document (say doc.tm)  by double 
clicking its entry in the Finder, texmacs opens, opens the doc.tm document 
and also opens an extra empty document. If the doc.tm document's window has 
focus and one clicks at the red (close window) button of the empty document, 
the window of the doc.tm is closed, while what should have closed is the 
empty document's window. Really annoying.

> 
> ! What would be best for TeXmacs to become adopted?
> * three points
> * one point
1. Have commonly used document classes (for me that means mainly revtex4) 
that look the same (or close) to the latex equivalent. Export/import between 
texmacs and latex (keeping the revtex 4 class in both) is a must if I want to 
efficiently collaborate with others (from n co-authors there are always at 
least some who are not willing to work with anything but latex).
2. To negotiate witch journals that texmacs-format documents be accepted. 
3. More intuitive user interface + more advertising.
> 
> ! How to organize TeXmacs as a community
> * three points
> * one point
1. I don't know exactly, but I believe it should be possible to be able to 
ask for a texmacs functionality one really needs, and there should be a 
possibility to pay for its (priority) implementation. (I would be willing to 
pay for some things to be done (faster)).
> 
> ! What kind of documentation would you like to see more?
> * three points
> * one point
1. Video tutorials of some more advanced (especially non-intuitive) 
functionality.
> 
> ! How should TeXmacs be publicized
> * Name change (or not): three suggestions and one suggestion
> * New website, new general graphical design (logo?).
> 
I think texmacs is a very good name! (to me it evokes technical documents to 
the max :-) which I find a good connotation ) I am strongly against the name 
change. I also like the current logo.
> ! What do you think you could contribute?
> * three points
> * one point
1. Translation to Slovak (but please provide some convenient tools - last 
time I tried I did not manage to save in the correct codepage and lost few 
hours of my work)
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Álvaro Tejero Cantero.
> 
> * whoever is interested in looking at the names that have been
> proposed already please make yourself a user in http://tiddlyspace.com
> and send to me privately the id so that I can authorize you to see the
> private pages in http://tamiz.tiddlyspace.com. You can suggest new
> names; in that case using the letters 't' and 'm' is of interest to
> ease the transition process.


Best, 

Peter.