Re: [Texmacs-dev] macro syntax, manual?

[david]

On Fri, Mar 21, 2003 at 02:51:37PM -0800, Karl M. Hegbloom wrote:\
> I find the macro syntax difficult to read and edit... I've not quite
> figured it out yet. I discovered that it's possible to export them
> as scheme, however, and find that much easier to (attempt to) work
> with. I would like it if the scheme output was pretty printed.

We agree with your concerns.

Though the preamble mode (to use in style files) is not really optimal
for usability I encourage people to use this instead of editing the
style files in raw text. The default texmacs document format is easy
to read, but it has numerous gotchas when you want to edit it.

It is not possible to use Scheme file format for style files because
texmacs assumes all files whose file name extension is '.ts' (i.e.
style files) are in texmacs format.

Something more Scheme-like for preamble mode is planned at some point
in the future. Any help appreciated.


> IMO, the syntax that was chosen is ugly, difficult to read and
> (probably) to edit (unless I just don't know "how it is done"?). I
> would much prefer to edit Scheme forms, or an XML. (I actually
> prefer Scheme over XML, though perhaps XML would be a useful
> secondary format, for use with XSLT, for instance, to implement
> version upgrades, etc.)

We alread had numerous discussions about XML export. You can find some
pointers and some code snippets on this mailing list. We still lack
complete tables to map all texmacs 'universal symbols' to unicode.

The policy in texmacs is that all tree transformations in the
distribution are going to be written in Scheme, so XSLT is out. We
plan to implement something to support native XSLT in a few years,
that is called Rewriters (check the archives).

                                                            -- DDAA