Cassiopeia on GNUstep... (was Re: TeXmacs NextStep backend)

[Gregory Casamento]

Andreas,

Fred is the expert, but I thought I would chime in since some of the work on the text system (in 2009) was done by me.  

There is no way to really know if a port will work out of the box unless you try it.  

GC

On Wed, Mar 13, 2013 at 11:25 AM, Andreas Höschler <address@hidden> wrote:

Hi all,

[I've already posted a similar message two years ago but in the meantime I saw that various useful part of Gnustep (like Renaissance) are being developed more, so I hope in more luck and feedback this time.] 

TeXmacs (www.texmacs.org) is a scientific editing platform with high-quality typesetting capabilities. Principal features are: structured wysiwyg editing, interface with many scientific/graphical softwares (like Maxima, Octave, R, gnuplot, Python), guile scripting. The codebase is a mix of C++ and scheme (Guile). TeXmacs *does not* depends on TeX in any way.

* The Cocoa/NS backend directory is trunk/src/src/Plugins/Cocoa
* The Qt backend is in trunk/src/src/Plugins/Qt

I think it would be a very strong addition to the set of GNUstep applications.

I was in urgent need of a scientific wordprocessing solution 20 years ago. Since nothing existed on the market that came even close to my demands I decided to develop one on my own. After a few hacking attempts on OS/2 Warp I discovered OPENSTEP and restarted the project Objective-C based. Apples NeXTstep acquisition was good news to me since this meant that I would have a deployment platform if I ever finished the project. :-)

I am happy to announce that I finally made it (after 20 years). The GNUstep/Cocoa based scientific wordprocessing solution can be checked out here

http://www.advanced-science.com

if anyone is interested. Please see the documentation links (especially http://www.advanced-science.com/ProductsCassiopeiaSymbolicAlgebra.html) to get an idea of the app. I for sure would have loved to see this 20 years ago while studying physics. May be this is of value to anyone (the next generation of physicists). It is definitely for me since I can continue my studies now. :-)

The app is currently available for Cocoa only since I doubt that the GNUstep text system is compatible enough for a port to succeed though I haven't checked that for years (so I might be mistaken). Fred?? However, the text system would be the only issue. Everything else (GUI, database backend,...) runs fine on any GNUstep platform (we actually use Solaris). So if there is enough interest and with some help by GNUstep core developers (-> text system) it might be very feasible to bring this thing to GNUstep in the forthcoming future.

Sorry, I didn't meant to hijack the thread! I just couldn't resist to respond to a TeX/NeXTSTEP subject.

Thanks a lot to all that have spent and continue to spend time into the core frameworks of GNUstep. We (humanity) need this platform more than ever. I really encourage everyone considering to start a larger software project to seriously consider GNUstep/OPENSTEP/Cocoa as the foundation. You can build skyscrapers on this platform.

Sorry for the noise! Over and out ...

Andreas

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Gregory Casamento
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