[Texmacs-dev] [LWN] Development story: TeXmacs 1.0.1 released

[David Allouche]

I see you regularly publish stories when stable versions of LyX are
released, but not for TeXmacs (yet it is mentioned in the Freshmeat
announcements and in the Scheme weekly news stories).

I am a glad subscriber to your excellent netzine and a core developer
of TeXmacs so I hope you will appreciate the quality of this GNU
software and help your readers be aware of the progresses of this
challenger to LaTeX system.

I hope you have already tested TeXmacs in the past and that you will
have the time to give it a new try to appreciate the improvements we
have be working on in the last 10 months. In case you do not have the
time, I would be happy to collaborate with you in writing a story you
can put to press.

=== Development/Application/Office Applications ===

===== TeXmacs 1.0.1 released =====

TeXmacs is an interactive typesetting system inspired by both LaTeX
and emacs, but not based on any of them. Though the name may be
misleading, that is *not* an Emacs mode for LaTeX, but a typesetting
system which is essentially independent from TeX. The only dependences
to TeX are METAFONT (to rasterize the high quality TeX fonts) and
BibTeX (to produce bibliographies).

Some people believe that free software is mostly good at providing
servers or cloning commercial software, and is otherwise stuck in
conceptions herited from the 70's era. TeXmacs is one project that
proves them wrong. It is a end user software which takes an innovative
approach to document production, finding its own better solutions to
problems of Word-alike text processors and TeX-based systems.

TeXmacs' philosophy is that it is possible to promote the creation of
structured document using a graphical tool. That is very different
from the LaTeX credo that users must not see the end result while
editing or they will produce visually structured documents.
Interestingly, Leslie Lamport (now working[1] for the Beast) did not
believe[2] structured editors had to be text-based.

  [1] http://research.microsoft.com/users/lamport/
  [2]
  http://research.compaq.com/SRC/personal/lamport/pubs/document-production.ps

The most relevant paragraph from this article is:

    Current logical systems require the user to describe his document
    as a text string, filled with obscure-looking commands. This is a
    cumbersome way to represent the logical structure of a document;
    it is a sign of the primitive nature of these systems, not an
    inherent feature of logical document production. Systems can be
    built to allow more convenient editing of the document's logical
    structure. I'm not interested in the question of whether the
    inconvenience of describing the document with an ASCII text file
    is bad enough to make visual systems preferable. Choosing between
    two evils is never pleasant. I will confine myself to arguing the
    inherent superiority of logical systems to visual ones

In this perspective, TeXmacs could be considered as what Lamport would
have liked to do. It allows the same flexibility of visual and logical
structuring as LaTeX but does come with a real user interface.

One thing that makes TeXmacs better than LaTeX front-ends (which I
repeat, it is not) is that the typesetter is an inherent part of the
editor. For one thing, that allows complete fidelity of the screen
output to the printed result. But that also allows these two parts of
the software to benefit from each other: typesetting benefits from the
structure used by the editor, and editing benefit from the high
quality layout provided by the editor.

The key features of TeXmacs are:

  High typesetting quality and complete WYSIWYGness -- The printed (or
     PostScript exported) document is completely identical to the
     printed result. The editor uses anti-aliasing to provide high
     quality display on screen. The TeXmacs typesetter aims to provide
     a typesetting quality equal or better than TeX. It already
     achieves that goal most documents. In particular provides better
     algorithms than TeX for page breaking and line staking.

  Structured document model -- The internal representation of a
     document is a labeled tree and a style list. This document model
     is much more semantically rich and regular than TeX and is much
     more easy to convert to other formats. As any LaTeX or XSL user
     can expect, the layout of a document can be extensively modified
     by simply using another style, and customized styles can be
     easily defined by combining the provided packages or by defining
     new ones.

     In older version of TeXmacs, the style system was similar to
     LaTeX, but has now evolved beyond it and future versions will
     support a transformation system general enough to support XSLT in
     real-time.

  Easy and efficient user interface -- The user interface allows novice
    users to perform all actions through GUI menus, and advanced users
    to not move their hands off from the keyboard. It introduced a
    very efficient and intuitive shortcut system for mathematical
    symbols which has been cloned in recent versions of LyX.

  Extensive customization -- The user interface can be almost
    completely redefined using GUILE/Scheme (we plan to remove the
    'almost' a soon as we can) and the style files can be extended or
    redefined by the user using the native TeXmacs typesetting
    language from the editor itself.

  GNU software -- TeXmacs is an official, RMS approved GNU software.
     Its source code and its documentation are licensed respectively
     under the GPL and the FDL.

The development of TeXmacs is sponsored by research institutions in
France. The main other (Joris van der Hoeven) is a mathematician at
CNRS (Orsay, France) and I am working as an "valorisation engineer"
for another branch of the CNRS (Rennes, France).

We also have a partnership[3] with Software in the Public Interest so
you can donate money to help us improve the software.

  [3] http://www.texmacs.org/Web/Donations.html
  

Now, the official announcement for TeXmacs 1.0.1.
_____________________________________________________________________
On Thu, Dec 19, 2002 at 07:49:25PM +0100, Joris van der Hoeven wrote:

We are happy to announce the release of GNU TeXmacs 1.0.1.
With respect to version 1.0, the major changes are the following:

  * The user interface has been completely redesigned so as
    to become more intuitive and compatible with other software.

  * The TeXmacs -> LaTeX and LaTeX -> TeXmacs converters have
    been improved. In particular, TeXmacs now generates LaTeX files
    which do no longer depend on the TeXmacs.sty style file.

  * We implemented several structural editing primitives and
    better ways to visualize structure.

  * The TeXmacs style files and packages have been reorganized,
    completed and improved.

  * The documentation system has been improved.
    In particular, we now provide online documentation and
    you may update your documentation from the web.
    The user manual has been translated into French too.

  * TeXmacs has been ported to Cygwin (Windows) and Fink (MacOS X).

  * Interfaces with the Axiom and Giac computer algebra systems
    have been implemented. There is also an experimental interface
    with GNU Octave.

  * Support has been added for Finnish and Ukrainian.

As to the future, the focus for version 1.0.2 will be on further
stabilization of the editor and support of Html and MathML.
We also plan to work on a Windows port and better support for
external plug-ins.
_____________________________________________________________________


Best regards.

-- 
David Allouche         | GNU TeXmacs -- Writing is a pleasure
Free software engineer |    http://www.texmacs.org
   http://ddaa.net     |    http://alqua.com/tmresources
   address@hidden  |    address@hidden
TeXmacs is NOT a LaTeX front-end and is unrelated to emacs.
 LocalWords:  CNRS Html