Major objectives for the upcoming stable versions (FSF GNU project)

Major objectives for the upcoming stable versions

Our main focus for the next stable version 1.1 (to be released during 2007) is on the improvement of the user interface and documentation. This comprises the following developments:

Increased standardization of the user interface: use M$-style keyboard shortcuts as the default (and provide Emacs compatability as an option), further simplification of the menus and increased use of popup windows.
Development of a markup-based graphical user interface for popup windows. This new interface might only be ready after the next stable version 1.1.
Development of user-friendly tools for documentation and translations, which can be used in a collaborative version over the web.
Completion of a TeXmacs user manual and make it available in book form.

The next stable version 1.1 should also contain a more robust version of the graphical drawing tool, which is developed by Henri Lesourd. Finally, we plan to create an association for the proposition of free scientific software. One of the objectives of this association is to create a simplified system for making donations to TeXmacs and sell our software and documentation.

Within a slightly longer time period of about one or two years, we have also started to reorganize TeXmacs so as to make it a stable development platform for developments. The aim is to reach as quickly as possible a point where the different parts of TeXmacs are well documented and modularized, so that they can easily be further developed in parallel by different people. Most of these deeper developments will reach their maturity only in the after-next stable version 1.2, and comprise the following items:

Improve the quality of the TeXmacs makefiles so as to make them completely compatible with automake and autoconf.
Improve the Cygwin port and other ports of TeXmacs and monitor the availability of TeXmacs in major distributions.
Reshape the low-level window interface so as to make the interface to Xlib easily portable to other systems, such as Gtk, Qt, MacOsX, Windows, etc. Also provide plugins for Cairo, OpenGL, etc.
Replace the current widget system by a markup-based system, with the possibility to use widgets (from Gtk, Qt, Aqua, etc.) from standard GUI's instead of the TeXmacs-provided style files.
Separate the style rewriting engine from the typesetter and make both completely lazy.
Increase the robustness and use of DRDs (Data Relation Definitions), which contain meta-information about TeXmacs or user-provided DTDs.
Migrate as much as possible of the high-level interface from C++ to Scheme.
Increase the robustness of TeXmacs and its Scheme APIs by providing detailed exception semantics and tools for debugging.
Provide extended documentation for developers and intelligent interactive ways to use this documentation.

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