Plans for the future

[Should be completed]

1.Typesetting

The typesetter should be reorganized and improved as follows:

• Decouple the style-sheet language from the actual typesetter.
• Better support for agglomerated documents (from physically different documents).
• Incorporation of better linking primitives (XLink, Proclus).
• More types of dynamic objects, like animations, help balloons, etc.
• Better line-breaking of large formulas.

2.Extra facilities for editing texts

Although cursor movement, selections, etc. have already been implemented, some other standard editing facilities have not yet been completed. Let us mention a few of these:

• Searching/replacing texts, formulas, certain environments etc. and regular expressions.
• Mathematical facilities: simplification of a selected region, substitutions of formulas in other formulas, etc.
• Version control.
• Data compression and protection.
• Grammar checkers and automatic translation programs. Does someone know where to find detailed free dictionaries and stuff like that?
• Incorporation of free speech recognition program.

3.A universal spreadsheet

We would like to incorporate a “universal spreadsheet” facility into TeXmacs. The idea is that all dependencies between the cells in the sheet are analyzed by TeXmacs, but all actual computations are delegated to an extern system of your choice, like one of the currently supported computer algebra systems. Also, the data of the spreadsheet will not necessarily be formatted in a rectangular table; one can also imagine dependencies between nodes of a tree, elements of a graph, or anything else.

4.Technical pictures

I also would like to include a facility for drawing technical pictures. In this implementation you should be able to benefit from the fact that you can define macros for making geometrical constructions. It would for instance be possible to write a style file for drawing electronic circuits or chemical components with a nice icon bar for selecting circuits or components, just as you select lines and circles in usual pictures.

5.Tools for usage on the web and in networks

It would be nice to have a better integration of TeXmacs with the web. As a first step, we need a clean internal plug-in for Wget or Curl with support for cookies, security, etc. At a second stage, the Html converters should be improved to take advantage of this. After that, we may think about things like collaborative authoring via the web, integration with preprint servers, etc.

Another interesting thing would be to incorporate tools for live conferencing inside TeXmacs using the recent concept of mutator tags. We actually expect this to be quite easy and this would open a different road towards collaborative authoring, instant messenging, etc.

6.Interface with computer algebra systems

The following improvements should still be made in order to link TeXmacs to computer algebra systems:

1. Improving the layout of computer algebra sessions.
2. Add extra features to increase the interoperability between TeXmacs and computer algebra systems and to give additional control over the layout of big output.
3. More semantics for the objects being communicated. This may either be high level information (like Openmath or HTML 4.0 mathematical markup) or low level information (including information about the representation of data), depending on the required speed.
4. Further possibilities for evolution concern highlighting, debugging facilities and so on.

7.Interaction with other GNU-like projects

It might be nice to increase the interaction between TeXmacs and other GNU-like projects, such as Gnome or multiplatform GUI's. This might facilitate the incorporation of extern data into TeXmacs documents or increase the number of supported platforms. On the other hand, several TeXmacs features, such as its font handling, might be interesting for other projects too.