mailing-list for TeXmacs Users

["David E. Miller" <address@hidden>]

Unquestionably TeXmacs is a superb tool for creating scientific and mathematical documents and publications. It should meet the needs of most users for this purpose unless they have unusual or specific constraints for publication style and layout. Creating unique TeXmacs styles for documents is likely  beyond the reach of the technical ability of many users, especially inexperienced and new users. Probably the hardest thing for many users to get used to is the idea that there is little need to worry about style and layout as those kinds of decisions are inherently attributes of the type of document. This allows users to focus on content. Most teachers, students and others that have requirements for producing typical documents with significant scientific or mathematical content should not have such unusual or sophisticated constraints for these that cannot be met using TeXmacs.

TeXmacs is attractive to those that are willing to put some effort into learning and working by doing some reading and actually putting the tool to work for producing documents relevant to their work. Unfortunately the reality is that increasingly users want matters to be "one-click" and are not as willing to take the time and make the effort to learn something new.

Several comments in messages preceding this one mentioned CAS and plug-ins, etc. This is a feature that sets TeXmacs apart in my opinion. These are not meant it seems to me to serve as interactive development interfaces for the relevant programs. Rather they are used to show formatted results in a technical document without cutting-and pasting. The relevant programs each have dedicated native environments used specifically for the purpose of interaction. It is probably too much to ask of TeXmacs and plug-in developers to match the capabilities of these dedicated programs given the diversity involved and the primary purpose of TeXmacs.

However, having said that a few of these plug-ins come close to providing what is available outside of TeXmacs. The Maxima plug-in is an example. While wxMaxima is a useful tool its documentation capabilities extend only to HTML and pdfLaTeX which must be manually coded into text cells. Most users are not going to learn either LaTeX or HTML and go through the labor in order to do this. wxMaxima in all practicality allows only unadorned textual comments. Using TeXmacs with the Maxima plug-in (which appears to be well-supported) is far superior for combining mathematical content with Maxima interaction.

I find the same to be true for using Python with NumPy, SciPy, Matplotlib, Scitools, etc. modules for numerical computation, although there are better interactive tools than TeXmacs for using scientific Python. I cannot say the same about the other TeXmacs plugins either because I have not tried them or because they have failed to work. For example, on Ubuntu GNU/Linux 12.04 with the latest TeXmacs package (v1.7.0.14) the Shell plug-in does not work (starts Dead) and this is not the bash-dash problem, because I have tried both linked to /bin/sh. It is something else and I do not have the time or know-how to fix it. Also, I have given up on the Octave plug-in. It seems that some have had success with getting this to work. But I tried it on MS Windows, Linux, and OS X and could not get it to work. It only works if no variables are used in an _expression_. Otherwise it merely returns the text string result "texmacs". I cannot recommend that anyone rely on the Octave plug-in, because it has a history of on-again, off-again support and reliability.

Like most good programs TeXmacs also has to contend with the issues involved in supporting Windows, OS X, and the many flavors of GNU/Linux. I have installed TeXmacs and Maxima and Octave using all three. By far GNU/Linux (I use Ubuntu) is the best in terms of reliability, support, integration, and ease of use. In short, making all these programs and their dependencies work well on these different operating systems can be a bucket of worms. I have developed an Lubuntu Linux VirtualBox virtual machine dedicated to TeXmacs and related mathematics software as an answer to this problem. It takes less than twenty minutes to download and install the VirtualBox host software that runs well on all three operating systems and to import (with one click) the virtual machine (OVA) file. My opinion is that this is the best way to deal with these interoperability  issues. I will post a link to the FTP URL when I get the files packaged together for proper distribution in the next couple of days for those that may be interested in this solution.

David E. Miller


On 2/28/2013 5:53 AM, Paul Zarucki wrote:

I would second Henri's comment - Texmacs is a superb interface to other mathematical programs. I like the way you can use it not only to do the maths but also to document and annotate it. I use it with maxima for CAS, Octave for numerical work and GNUplot for general plotting.

Paul.

On 28/02/13 07:48, Henri Girard wrote:

Texmacs has this wonderfull(the word is not enaugh !) interface to CAS and specially sagemath, because I don't like notebook at the moment. For maxima there is wxmaxima (not as pretty rendering as texmacs) but already very good, python plugin as well. But as I change often, I can put a sagemath session and a maxima session ... And other ones !
Recently texmacs user told me how to embedd automatically graphics in sagemath and then this was the revelation : save('') ps_out('').
I am getting many english tutorial about cas and making a french pot pourit with them, some are really astonishing : schwarzchild potential, planck constante...
Thanks to all who accomplish this...
(Between I just discovered ipython qtconsole...)
Henri

Le 27/02/2013 16:23, François-Xavier Thomas a écrit :

I've said that a lot, but to me the most amazing TeXmacs feature is in the shortcuts and visual feedback.

I can enter LaTeX very well in Vim, and in LyX as well, but the shortcuts in TeXmacs are so intuitive -- working by similar-looking characters with the Tab key is a genius move -- that I always feel like a donkey trying to type when I manually enter LaTeX.

Yes, you can interface it with other things, but I have to say I've never used that feature. TeXmacs is primarily a document editor for me, so I almost always export my graphics manually from other programs.

On Feb 27, 2013, at 4:10 PM, Michael Lachmann wrote:

Cool!

I think, though, that the description of both needs to try to get at
the differences between the two. As it currently stands, one could use
the description of either TeXmacs/Lyx, and use it for the other one.

Also, I think TeXmacs isn't anymore an "interfaces to many Computer
Algebra Systems". Look through the list... octave, R, python, (btw,
where is shell and gnuplot in that list?)
I'm not sure what to call it. One could say "as a front end to almost
any program" (???)


Michael

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On 27 February 2013 14:27, Alvaro Tejero Cantero <address@hidden> wrote:

There is a new site for subjective questions to be dealt with in an
structured fashion, and there's one question (that I posted) that concerns
TeXmacs:

http://slant.co/topics/what-is-the-best-interactive-typesetter/

You're welcome to chime in and help improve the description of TeXmacs
there.

Best,

-á.

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