Re: [Texmacs-dev] Publishing TeXmacs documents (was: Italic font display with TeXmacs 1.0.4-R2)

[Joris van der Hoeven]

On Fri, 13 Aug 2004 address@hidden wrote:
> It is important for me to write in TeXmacs since I am much more
> efficient. However the production department at Springer-NY
> had no experience with it.

That may change if you ask for the support of TeXmacs with insistance.
This is already the case when you write articles, but even more
with books. We currently do have a project with Springer for making
interactive books. They might be willing to support our document
format for other purposes to (we discussed that), but this will
clearly be accelerated when authors keep asking for this.

> A principal problem was that they objected to the presence of
> Type 3 fonts in the exported postscript files. The Adobe
> software their compositor uses is broke (perhaps by design
> on the part of Adobe) for Type 3 fonts.
>
> This is already a problem with TeX, of course, whose typical
> drivers use Type 3 fonts. For TeX, there is pdftex and
> pdflatex. For TeXmacs I understand that this has been
> improved by the support for pdf in TeXmacs 1.0.3 but there
> are still problems. For example, TeXmacs uses the bbm fonts
> by design, and these are not available as Type 1 fonts.  The
> ams blackboard bold fonts are available as Type 1 fonts.

We might make it an option to use the AMS fonts (even though
I think that they are uglier). How much extra work a program
like Acrobat Reader can cause to us!

> The figures are made with Metapost and included TeX fonts. Of
> course these were Type 3 fonts. They told me included Type 3
> fonts in the figures are not a problem and ``we have no idea why.''

They apparently care less about readability of fonts
in pictures with Acrobat Reader.

> TeXmacs 1.0.3 was not available when the book was starting to
> get final. Because of the font problem, and because Springer
> wanted to use their svmono.cls style files, I decided to work
> with the exported LaTeX file. I ended up doing quite a bit of
> editing of the exported .tex file while continuing to write
> in TeXmacs. For this reason I maintained a patch containing
> the differences between the exported latex file and the
> edited one.

Did you ask whether they would publish a native TeXmacs pdf
if you would manage to get the fonts right? What style are
you using? svmono? We should support this style soon.

> One thing that I do not like about TeXmacs' exported latex
> file is that uses utf encoding to represent letters with
> umlauts and accents. This seems undesirable and asking
> for portability trouble, and unnecessary since tex has a
> perfectly good scheme to represent these in plain ascii.

This could be made an option too, when we have time...
As to myself, I prefer to see the real letters:
\c{c} seems a bit verbose to me for French c-cedillas.

Thanks for your feedback, Joris