[Texmacs-dev] Re: Texmacs is pretty hard to use....

[Joris van der Hoeven]

On Tue, 9 Apr 2002, Marc Schoechlin wrote:

> Hello developers,
> 
> i tried to write a technical documentation with texmacs, but it was too 
> hard to start :-))
> 
> Document Parameters:
> 
> - German language
> - Document-Style "book"
> 
> I fail on the following things:
> 
> * Define a page-head (a gif-logo, and a special text automatically(!) on 
> each sheed)

Yes, this is something which should be added to the menus.
You may set the headers using the functions "odd-header" and "even-header",
but I agree that this is rather something for the expert users
at the moment.

David: can you put this as important on the wish list?

> * Setting a Title for the document (sorry i haven't found the option)

In book style, this does not really make sense,
because that would rather be a title page.
But users often prefer to determine the layout of
title pages themselves... You do have title macros
in the article style.

> * Defining sections always shows a red text: <error||bad plus>

You should start a chapter first.

But you are right, that we should display something cleaner.
David: wish-list?

> Is there any understandable documentaion available, to solve this 
> trivial problems ?
> (Sorry - on your website it was to hard to find this information)

Not about the style files; we intend to improve them soon and
write some better documentation.

> Sorry about grumbling so much :-))
> Texmacs generally seems to be a very nice tool, i'm determined to use 
> this tool in future - and to
> describe the problems in detail - to improve texmacs.

Yes please do so. As I said, we are going to redesign the style files and
the corresponding DTD's soon. You may participate to this effort at

http://alqua.com/tmresources/redesign%20of%20the%20style%20files

(I just created this page, but you may expect it to become bigger soon).
You may see this is an excellent occasion to let us implement thinks that
are most useful for you... We are also setting up a project for
the TeXmacs documentation at

        http://www.gnu.org/software/texmacs-doc/index.en.tm

(from inside TeXmacs; it does not work yet but it should by
the end of this week). Since you want to use TeXmacs for
documentation purposes, don't hesitate to discuss documentaton
issues with us. We also search for people who would be willing
to document the style files; this might be a good way to learn
the ins and outs and to be helpful to others at the same time...

Best regards, Joris


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Joris van der Hoeven <address@hidden>
http://www.texmacs.org: GNU TeXmacs scientific text editor
http://www.math.u-psud.fr/~vdhoeven: personal homepage
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