*Sent:* Monday, July 12, 2021 at 7:51 PM
*From:* "Massimiliano Gubinelli" <m.gubinelli@gmail.com
<mailto:m.gubinelli@gmail.com>>
*To:* "Christopher Dimech" <dimech@gmx.com <mailto:dimech@gmx.com>>
*Cc:* "Basile Audoly" <baudoly@gmail.com <mailto:baudoly@gmail.com>>, "texmacs-users"
<texmacs-users@texmacs.org <mailto:texmacs-users@texmacs.org>>
*Subject:* Re: arXiv
>Dear Christopher,
>you can read here the submission guidelines
>https://arxiv.org/help/submit#text <https://arxiv.org/help/submit#text>
>Where they say that they accept PDF which is clearly not true, since they do
not accept our PDF files.
>They explicitly say:
>"Our goal is to store articles in formats that are highly portable and stable over
time. Currently, the best choice is TeX/LaTeX."
Thank you Massimiliano. After reviewing their strategy, I do not see how arXiv
is actually interested in Free Software. But
actual progress has- been happenning at Rice University, at MIT, Poland and
Spain.
>I make you ponder the fact that if nobody tries to challenge the status quo the
current best choice will be the choice for the next 50 years. Irrespective of its
>technical merits. I do not see how this what free software is about. It should be
more about allowing people to use the best public technologies to express >themselves
and leave to the technology the burden of uninteresting tasks.
>Personally I would be satisfied if a subset of TeX/LaTeX could be agreed upon which
allows to use it as a document exchange/storage format. (Think about >the passage
from PS to PDF). I think this is a more worthy endeavour than to criticise our, in my
opinion, fair right to request that arXiv remove a bug in their >PDF-analysis program.
Although not taking the source specific criticism is unfortunate, I can see the
basis of your request and consider it valid.
I will look into this as a worthy endeavour.
Felicitations
Christopher
>Best regards,
>Massimiliano Gubinelli
>PS: recently with some colleagues we submitted a paper to a (good) mathematical journal, written in
LaTeX (i.e. no TeXmacs since my coauthors do not use >it). The proofs which came back from the editor
were a complete mess, it required a 10 pages letter to indicate all the corrections to be made and a
couple >of weeks of back/forth mail exchange. So you see, when you look in the details, things are
not so nice as they seems. Not to mention that unless you install >on your machine ~3GB of useless
packages you are not really sure to be able to reproduce a given output from your "highly portable
and stable" source >code.
I understand your criticism about the useless packages. Basic Latex should be
expanded if need be, and a few specific utilities accepted.
But not more than that. Allowing one to use any package would certainly limit
the validity of my arguments. The problem of making documents
still prevails after more than forty years.
On 12. Jul 2021, at 03:09, Christopher Dimech <dimech@gmx.com
<mailto:dimech@gmx.com>> wrote:
*>Sent:* Sunday, July 11, 2021 at 2:31 AM
*>From:* "Basile Audoly" <baudoly@gmail.com <mailto:baudoly@gmail.com>>
*>To:* "Christopher Dimech" <dimech@gmx.com <mailto:dimech@gmx.com>>
*>Cc:* "texmacs-users" <texmacs-users@texmacs.org
<mailto:texmacs-users@texmacs.org>>
*>Subject:* Re: arXiv
>Dear Christopher,
>No, it would definitely be easier (and more logical) to have arXiv correct
the bug that erroneously tags PDF files as being produced by LaTeX once for all,
>than to require every single TeXmacs submission to be exported to LaTeX.
>Currently, arXiv is accepting PDF produced by MS word but blocking those
produced by TeXmacs.
If that is so, I would criticise harshly their modus-operandi.
>Your point about the TeXmacs format sounds unfair to me. TeXmacs is far more
structured than LaTeX which does not follow a well-defined grammar. >Parsing
meta-data from TeXmacs source is trivial.
Beyond the technical, there are other considerations. Whilst it could be
well structured according to some software engineering metric.
But its syntactic format is not more accessible to code modification than
tex or latex, or to any other programming language. I might
understand the production of an internal format that fits in with a more
structured format for what you want to do. But in doing so, you
have removed an important aspect. Whilst it could be acceptable with
schools and colleges, I do not see how to avoid the observation
I have made.
Myself, I would reject outputs from GUI that I would not be able to modify
myself using a basic editor. Whilst I understand the work people
have put in it, introducing a syntactic format for users to change directly
would allow others to understand the document without superficial
barriers.
I an not convinced that my evaluation has been unfair. arXiv is certainly
being unfair accepting outputs from MS. Does arXiv accept docements
and source done with texinfo commands?
Felicitations
Christopher
>Best wishes,
>Basile
Le 10 juil. 2021 à 16:01, Christopher Dimech <dimech@gmx.com
<mailto:dimech@gmx.com>> a écrit :
Would it not be easier if you can export a latex version, and send that
for arXiv. TeXmacs has its own typesetting engine, but it's format
as with xml is almost impossible to work with from source. That is the
fundamental criticism about TeXmacs. It's design is not
germaine to use from source.
----- Christopher Dimech
Administrator General - Naiad Informatics - Gnu Project
Society has become too quick to pass judgement and declare someone
Persona Non-Grata, the most extreme form of censure a country can
bestow.
In a new era of destructive authoritarianism, I support Richard
Stallman. Times of great crisis are also times of great
opportunity. I call upon you to make this struggle yours as well !
https://stallmansupport.org/ <https://stallmansupport.org/>
https://www.fsf.org/ <https://www.fsf.org/> https://www.gnu.org/
<https://www.gnu.org/>
.
*Sent:* Sunday, July 11, 2021 at 1:23 AM
*From:* "Basile Audoly" <baudoly@gmail.com <mailto:baudoly@gmail.com>>
*To:* "texmacs-users" <texmacs-users@texmacs.org
<mailto:texmacs-users@texmacs.org>>
*Subject:* arXiv
Dear TeXmacs users,
arXiv is blocking submissions from TeXmacs. I have submitted for the
following bug report with them. I would encourage you to send a similar email
if you encounter difficulties. Maybe they will take it seriously if many of us
complain?
Best wishes,
Basile
Hello,
I am writing my papers using GNU TeXmacs (www.texmacs.org
<http://www.texmacs.org/>), a wonderful, free, multi-platform editor for
scientific documents. Its name might be misleading but TeXmacs is *not* related to
TeX/LaTeX: it has its own typesetting engine.
When I submit to arXiv a PDF file produced with TeXmacs, it is
incorrectly recognized as being produced by LaTeX, and the submission process
is blocked until I provide the latex sources which do not exist. This makes it
effectively impossible to submit TeXmacs document to arXiv. This is very
unfortunate as TeXmacs is a great software, arguably superior to LaTeX in
several aspects.
I am attaching a sample TeXmacs document. I am hoping that you can
either correct your LaTeX detection algorithm so that similar documents do not
get erroneously blocked, or let me know which properties of the PDF document
exactly are used to tag it as being produced LaTeX, so I can help the TeXmacs
developers identify a work-around.
TeXmacs is a great free software that needs encouragements from our
community and not additional barriers.
Best wishes,
(your name here)
Le 20 nov. 2021 à 11:46, Giovanni Piredda <pireddag@posteo.de
<mailto:pireddag@posteo.de>> a écrit :
Joris told me that he already did it, with no effect. But some time passed, so
maybe one can try again. If different people do the same report, it may
increase the chance of a response, so a good strategy could be that *all*
interested people submit an issue report.
Giovanni
On 20.11.21 11:31, Frank wrote:
Hello,
According to
https://github.com/arXiv/arxiv-submission-ui/blob/develop/submit/controllers/ui/new/reasons.py
<https://github.com/arXiv/arxiv-submission-ui/blob/develop/submit/controllers/ui/new/reasons.py>
we should report the issue to help@arxiv.org
Best,
Frank
于 2021年11月19日 UTC 下午3:34:41, Giovanni Piredda <pireddag@posteo.de> 写到:
I could post an issue in the bug tracker of the ArXiv
(https://github.com/arXiv/arxiv-base/issues), but I would like to hear
>from you before I do that. Do you think it is better classifying it
under "bug" or something else?
G.
Am 19.11.2021 um 16:29 schrieb TeXmacs:
Dear Giovanni,
If someone could get a patch accepted that solves this problem at ArXiv,
then that would be very nice. But I personally have no time for this;
I just changed 'TeXmacs' to 'T e X m a c s' for the Pdf creator;
this is a bit ugly, bit it will do for now.
Best wishes, --Joris
On Fri, Nov 19, 2021 at 02:48:15PM +0000, Giovanni Piredda wrote:
Maybe the examination of the code in https://github.com/arXiv could
also help.
Perhaps they accept pull requests.
Giovanni
Am 19.11.2021 um 11:49 schrieb TeXmacs:
Dear Basile,
Thanks for this extremely useful feedback.
It is still annoying to not use our real name for the creator/producer.
If I make it 'T e X m a c s', then does that work?
Best wishes, --Joris
On Fri, Nov 19, 2021 at 07:49:47AM +0100, Basile Audoly wrote:
Dear Joris,
I did a few more tests. Bottomline is that arXiv rejects any PDF document that matches
the string "*tex*" in the /Creator or /Producer fields, and the match is
case-insensitive.
Changing fonts actually has no effect (contrary to what I was writing before).
To be specific, changing both /Creator or /Producer to 'T.Xmacs' works, but
changing to 'Texmacs' or 'GNU Texmacs' fails.
TeX Gyre fonts (Bonum) works just as well, even though "TeX" appears in the
/BaseFont field: this field seems to be ignored (which makes sense).
Best,
Basile
Le 11 nov. 2021 à 19:54, TeXmacs <texmacs@lix.polytechnique.fr> a écrit :
Hi Basile,
This is a very interesting hack.
It would be nice to have some volunteers to investigate this further.
Question 1: if you replace 'TeXmacs' by 'Texmacs' or 'GNU Texmacs' instead of
'T.Xmacs', does it still work?
Question 2: could someone please try with any of the TeX Gyre fonts (which also
have TeX in their name)?
Question 3: if you replace 'Computer Modern' with 'Knuth's Modern Font' and (if
necessary) occurrences of
CMR, CMMI, CMEX, etc. with something else (just on lines with /FontName or
/BaseFont), then does this
also do the trick?
Best wishes, --Joris
On Sat, Jul 10, 2021 at 06:52:11PM +0200, Basile Audoly wrote:
Hi everyone,
arXiv incorrectly identifies PDF documents produced by TeXmacs as if they had
been produced by LaTeX and blocks them, see my previous email.
Here a dirty but simple hack to work around this:
* change the document font from Computer Modern (a.k.a. Roman) to Optima—any
other font except CM will probably work as well
* export to PDF
* open the PDF document in emacs, search for the string "TeXmacs" and replace the two
occurrences corresponding to the PDF Creator and Producer with "T.Xmacs"
Of course, this prevents arXiv from being aware of the full content of the
document. Exporting to LaTeX is still a viable (but more complicated)
alternative.
Basile