[Texmacs-dev] Re: Contribution...

[Joris van der Hoeven]

Hi,

Thanks a lot for your patch. I am particularly happy with it,
because improving the LaTeX -> TeXmacs converter is a particularly
urgent and complicated (often even nasty) task.
It is a bit late now, so I have not had time yet to check
all modifications, but they look good and the test files are very handy.

>    I have checked the latex commands defined in latex_commands and I have 
> corrected some problems (especially symbols):
> - \widetilde and \bar
> - \dot, \ddot, \dddot and \ddddot 
> - several arrows
> - \qquad, \imath, \jmath and many others
> - math arrays can have options
>    I have also made some changes in parsetex.gen.cc, fromtex.gen.cc
>    I have created some LaTeX files to test TeXmacs translator capabilities 
> (math_symbols.tex, decorations.tex, math_arrays.tex and biblio.tex). It seems 
> that commented and multiple citations are not taken into account.
>    I tried to implement align and align* math environments in env-math.ts. Is 
> it the right place to define these environments ?

Yes, it definitely is; writing style files is still a bit clumsy,
especially for tabular environments, so do not hestitate to ask us for help.

>    There is a weird thing in TeXmacs: in equations when two or more letters 
> are entered TeXmacs automatically switch to roman fonts ! Is there any way to 
> disable this behaviour ?

No, there is not, but we consider that it is a good behaviour.
Indeed, it forces you to specify the meaning of a formula;
a*b is not the same as f x.

Coming back to the converter issue: would you be interested in helping me
to write a cleaner converter? The plan is to rewrite fromtex.cc
in the Scheme extension language. This has already been done for totex.cc.
In fact, the target format of the current conversion is a very old
TeXmacs format; it has to be upgraded all the way up to the present one.
When fromtex.cc has been rewritten, the next step would be to improve
parsetex.cc so that it does not get as confused as is the case now by
missing $'s and so. One trick might be to enforce a given mode as soon
as a mode-specific command like \frac or \section is encountered.

Yet another thing: can you tell me which version of TeXmacs you used?
I need to know this in order to check the differences between
your version and the current one, so that your patch can be integrated.

Thanks again for your valuable contribution,

Joris