Re: [Texmacs-dev] Some thoughts and concerns about the idea and proposal on GSoC

[Massimiliano Gubinelli]

Some more general context is in the manual:

""
There is a constant need for good converters from and to other data formats:

•  Of course, TeX/LaTeX cannot really be considered as a format (it is really a 
language with an ill defined grammar). Nevertheless it is important to have 
good heuristic converters in both directions. We still would appreciate help in 
this direction, in particular in order to support standard documents styles of 
various journals.
•  TeXmacs is also compatible with Html, but some things such as forms have not 
been implemented yet. The importation of tables could also be further improved 
and it would be nice if the importer could support cascaded style sheets.
•  It would be nice to have converters for the document formats used by Open 
Office, Word, and the internal formats used by important publishers such as 
Elsevier.
•  It would be nice to have converters for various markdown formats as used by 
sites such as Wikipedia. Similarly, it would be nice to have an interface for 
Jupyter notebooks.
•  We would appreciate help for writing a converter from TeXmacs to the Texinfo 
format, which is the standard documentation format for the GNU project.
""

Personally, I think having very good quality export to HTML is an important 
feature. Ideally one would like to be able to produce HTML versions of standard 
math documents which are adaptable to various screen sizes, for example like 
those here:

https://www.arxiv-vanity.com


best,
max

> On 27. Mar 2020, at 17:02, Massimiliano Gubinelli <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> AFAIK,
> conversion happens mainly in the scheme code so you may want to start from 
> there and go to C++ only if you do not understand what is going on. You want 
> to look at TeXmacs/progs/convert and subdirectiories there. I think for 
> starting a macro plan should do.
> 
> best
> max
> 
> 
> 
>> On 27. Mar 2020, at 16:28, Yue, Xiang <address@hidden> wrote:
>> 
>> Hi texmacs developers:
>> 
>> I'm an applicant of GSoC2020, and I just found texmacs in GNU GSoC page. 
>> I'm not sure whether this project idea is uploaded few days ago (or not?) 
>> but, anyway, I found it pretty interesting to make some converting from 
>> texmacs to other format document. And I downloaded texmacs and found it 
>> making texting document with math symbols in a fun and easy way. I hope I 
>> can participate in the follow up works of the "converters" ideas, and I've 
>> cloned and started reading existing codes about improving converter. 
>> Basically I guess I would begin with collecting detailed differences of HTML 
>> and HTML5 and started what I can improve.
>> However here are my concerns: first, texmacs seems to be large and I'm not 
>> sure to whether I can write a well prepared coding plan since I need to 
>> deliver proposal in four days, not to mention that I cannot even propose a 
>> PR. I guess the only thing that I can do is to make a rough plan so I want 
>> to ask if that's okay; second, I'm pretty familiar with c++ development, 
>> but, as for scheme, I need a little bit time to recollect it since I haven't 
>> use it for a long time. I also notice these two form the code of converter 
>> part, which means I have to use them, but still I need roughly a week to 
>> recollect and read the code.
>> So I'd like to ask you if it is okay to write a proposal as a macro 
>> developing plan (of course, following the items designated in proposal 
>> writing guidance) without too much technical details. 
>> Hope to collaborate with you soon and wish you all in good health :)
>> 
>> Best regards,
>> Xiang
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>