Re: [Texmacs-dev] TeXmacs server

[Offray Vladimir Luna Cárdenas]

Hi,

Alvaro Tejero Cantero escribió:
> == On TeXmacs bridges with the outside world ==
>
> There is a huge work to do to promote TeXmacs in environments where it
> already is a winner. I personally find that TeXmacs is one of the most
> consistently underpromoted, less-than-ideally known free software
> projects. In other words, it deserves much more attention than it
> gets.
>
> * tune the filters so that you can use it to get a printable version
> of wikipedia's pages, either by visiting yourself the pages with TM or
> by getting wikipedia to run the page through TeXmacs. This could also
> lead to the use of TM inside wikipedia as the compiler for math, with
> the added benefit of MathML output. Such a service would draw a lot of
> attention towards TeXmacs.
Wikipedia it's a pretty popular wiki and this integration would help to 
promote TeXmacs a lot. But I think that we could extend that idea 
further. We're using wikis (powered by MoinMoin, instead of mediawiki, 
because it suit better our needs) in el-directorio[1] and eduwiki[2], 
and specially for eduwiki, having TeXmacs as an external editor for the 
content, specially the mathematical oriented would be nice. For the 
moment most of the Wikis I know use their own system for Version Control 
of the documents, but only can be used for Wiki documents, SVNWiki and 
Trac use a general VCS so they could be used more generally to other 
documents.

[1] www.el-directorio.org
[2] www.eduwiki.info

The way in wich wikis put mathematical content on Internet is generally  
using LaTeX rendering as  images. There are some wikis, like the one in 
planetmath, wich use LaTeX all the time, there are others (mediawiki, 
moin) that use a more easy to learn but limited syntax and only LaTeX 
for mathematics.

I would like a "degrade gracefully" approach for Wikis and TeXmacs 
interaction (and I would talking about the general problem, not a 
specific one for the TeXmacs only documents Wiki). At the moment this 
are just ideas, but this is what I think we would need:

* A way in wich TeXmacs could import/export to wiki format. The easy 
sintax of the wikis may be conversion pretty easy, for the most popular 
elements in syntax. Something like replace "<section|Title>" with "= 
Title =", "<subsection|Subtitle>" with " == Subtitle ==", "<em|test>" 
with " ''test'' ", "<strong|other test>" with " '''other test''' " and 
so on. The LaTeX indivual formulas would need to be imported/exported 
using the exinting filters. Of course, having a pretty rich format like 
the TeXmacs one exported to a the wiki one could imply a lot of 
information loose, but the idea woul be to have the original rich docs 
stored also, so you're always editing in the most rich format. Moin has 
the possibility to export wiki docs as docbook, so may be this code 
could be used or the format as an intermediate one.

* There are some Wikis, like the Axiom one, that can integrate computer 
algebra engines for parts of their documents. Would be nice to see how 
this works and see if there is somekind of protocol or home made 
solution that could be extended for CAS sessions in TeXmacs documents 
when they're are showed as web wiki docs.

* The advantage of this approach is that people could use the wiki docs 
(easy syntax plus LaTeX)  for editing if they have not TeXmacs available.

* If people doesn't have TeXmacs in their machines, they could be 
served also, as a remote application that is showed inside the browser 
using java + vnc, without any rewriting. We have tried this approach 
with some stundents here, and at least in this scale is pretty usable 
(but the idea of Wiki integration was not there in that time).
[...]
> * polish interconversion with Openoffice's OpenDocument format, in the
> beginning by assuring it via intermediate HTML would make TeXmacs
> usable for people who have to work in office environments but want to
> be productive (mouse-based edition as in OOo is painful, and the
> nesting concept of TeXmacs is really powerful).
I remember something who talk about OpenOffice import/export from 
TeXmacs, without intermediate formats. I even remember reading some 
article about it. Could anyone remember the exact information?

[...]
> * get funding to make the Windows version comparable to the unix one.
> It has also been many times argued that using one of the major
> toolkits would help get more attention.

I really hate Windows! :-p. Seriously, any time I recomend TeXmacs to 
windows users and they use the windows version, they get errors that I 
never get in Linux, and sometimes they loose their information. I dont 
like to spend time with windows, so my support to them in pretty poor. 
My idea is to make, again vía VNC, TeXmacs app available to Windows 
users. Sometime ago we made a LiveCD distro with TeXmacs and other CAS 
inside, so the people could use TeXmacs without major concerns about the 
lack of Linux in their machines or (at that time) without Cygwin 
installation or even concer about the differences in maturity of Linux 
or Windows versions of TeXmacs. I know that now there are some Linux 
distros wich can run "inside" Windows. So may be another way to put 
TeXmacs inside windows is running it as a Linux app inside windows and 
served vía VNC to the windows user, without loading all the distro, just 
the things needed to run Windows... well, is just an idea.

Cheers,

Offray