Answer. GNU TeXmacs

• is a free scientific text editor, which was both inspired by TeX and GNU Emacs.
• allows you to write structured documents via a wysiwyg (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) and user friendly interface.
• lets you create new styles.
• implements high-quality typesetting algorithms and TeX fonts, which helps you to produce professionally looking documents.
• is suitable as an interface for computer algebra systems, as the high typesetting quality goes through for automatically generated formulas.
• can be highly customized as it supports the Guile/Scheme extension language.
• lets you export your documents to PS and PDF and offers both import and export to HTML, LaTeX, Scheme, Verbatim and Xml. We would very much appreciate your help for writing and improving converters for TeXmacs documents.

Answer. TeXmacs can be used for

• Books and Articles. They can be written fully within TeXmacs. If your publisher requires a certain LaTeX style for an article, then as a last step you can export your document to LaTeX and make the final modifications there.
• Presentations.
• Interface to computer algebra systems and other scientific software.
• Webpages. For example the TeXmacs webpage is maintained as TeXmacs documents, which are exported to HTML.

Answer. TeXmacs can be easily installed on all major systems. There are rpm and Debian packages as well as binaries available for Linux. For Mac OS X there is a Fink package. For MS Windows, a Cygwin package is available.

Work is in progress to rewrite the graphical user interface of TeXmacs, so that it becomes more portable. Your help might actually be very useful here.

Answer. A reasonably fast machine is recommended. Having said this, I (Andreas) am typing this on a Pentium III 450Mhz under Cygwin, and TeXmacs is still useable here, although not overly reactive.

Answer. You will find out, that much LaTeX-knowledge can be reused. For example, you can start a section by typing \section[return] or you get α₁ by typing $\alpha_1$. Note that there are even shorter ways provided, for example $a[tab]$ gives you an alpha as well, so you might want to migrate after a while. Styles like article, book or seminar, as known from LaTeX, are provided as well. Furthermore, many Emacs shortcuts like C-x C-s for saving a file, or C-_ for undo will work.

Answer. The best place is the TeXmacs user mailing list. Search this list and the FAQ beforehand, to ensure your question was not asked before.

Answer. TeXmacs falls under the GNU public licence.

Answer. This behaviour is normal. TeXmacs calls Metafont in order to generate fonts which are not yet present. The first time you launch TeXmacs, many fonts may therefore have to be generated. In order to avoid this, you may download some pregenerated fonts.

Answer. This question is due to a fundamental misunderstanding about TeXmacs. Indeed, TeXmacs is not based on TeX/LaTeX, although it does support (not yet perfect) conversion to and from LaTeX. Furthermore, in theory at least, there is actually no need anymore to look at something like the TeX source, since TeXmacs is guaranteed to be fully WYSIWYG. Conversion to LaTeX may only be useful, when transmitting an accepted paper to the publisher of a journal.

Answer. When I (Joris) started to develop TeXmacs about four years ago, the common graphical user interfaces were not as good as nowadays. Moreover, I wanted the GUI to support some special features, like TeX fonts in the menus. Nevertheless, now that graphical user interfaces did become much better, I plan to switch to guile-gtk as soon as possible. Using Guile-gtk in combination with TeXmacs has three main advantages:

1. One has full access to the GTK widget set, which includes menus, scrollable windows, file choosers, iconbars, etc.
2. Guile-gtk provides you with a very flexible and customizable way to use these widgets.
3. The incorporation of Guile-gtk in TeXmacs should be natural, since TeXmacs already supports the Guile/Scheme extension language.

Answer. If you get an error message including the following:

Fatal error: I failed to connect to Xserver in 'x_display_rep::x_display_rep

then execute export DISPLAY=127.0.0.1:10.0 on the remote machine and make sure your /etc/hosts file is sound, i.e. it contains the line 127.0.0.1 localhost and the IP information about the local and remote machine.

Answer. Graphics card drivers with poor 2D performance can slow TeXmacs down termendously.

If you are running TeXmacs under X on a system with an ATI graphics card and are using ATI's proprietary drivers (the driver called fglrx), you can achieve a significant speedup by

• either running an X server such as Xgl that performs 2D operations using the 3D API of the graphics card driver,
• or switching to an open source graphics card driver such as ati or radeon which have a far better 2D performance than fglrx.

Note that if you try both at the same time, you will slow your system down even more, instead of speeding it up.

Answer. Look at the Cygwin FAQ at http://cygwin.com/faq.html, the Cygwin User Guide at http://cygwin.com/cygwin-ug-net/ and search the Cygwin mailing list http://www.cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/.

Answer. Create a file texmacs.bat with the following content:

    rem cmdow @ /hid

    c:\cygwin\bin\bash –login -c "texmacs \"‘cygpath -u "%1"‘\""

Ensure that it lies in your PATH. Now you can associate .tm files with this batch file.

If you want to hide the black Cygwin window when TeXmacs is started, then download cmdow from http://www.commandline.co.uk/cmdow/, drop cmdow.exe e.g. in your C:\WINDOWS\system32 directory (this applies to Windows XP installed on C:\) and uncomment (i.e. remove “rem” from) the first line of texmacs.bat.

Answer. Install the Cygwin package aspell. Execute in a shell:

    cd /usr/bin

    ln -s /usr/share/aspell/ispell ispell

Answer. It is strongly recommended to have a Windows username without spaces. Please make a new account, as simply changing the username could be insufficient.

Answer. Clicking once on a word will place the cursor there, clicking twice marks this word, clicking thrice will mark the paragraph and so on; eventually, the whole document will be selected.

Answer. Mark a region, and spell checking will be restricted to this selection.

Answer.

1. Create a PostScript image of your table using OpenOffice (File→Print→Print to file). Name the file, for example, “table1.ps”.
2. Convert the PostScript file to an Encapsulated PostScript file (.eps) using ps2epsi in a shell. Just type: “ps2epsi table1.ps table1.eps”.
3. Insert or link the image table.eps in the TeXmacs document.

Answer. Put a label on the last page of your document and use the pageref primitive in order to produce the corresponding number.

Answer. Put your cursor right behind the image and press backspace. You will see the name of the image, followed by six other fields. The two fields after the name of the image are respectively its width and its height. You may for instance set the width to 5cm and the height to 27mm. When leaving the width open, it will automatically be determined as a function of the height (and vice versa). When leaving both fields open, the image will be reproduced at its original size. Notice that a width of 1par will span your image over the paragraph width.

Answer. This is because TeXmacs thinks, that the sentence ends after the dot in the abbreviation. To resolve this a posteriori, mark the abbreviation and press A-a. To care for this while writing: A-a etc. [right].

Answer. Type M-/ after the space.

Answer. I recommand to convert the preamble to TeXmacs and to put the result in a TeXmacs style file. However, the result will probably be disappointing, because conversion between TeX/LaTeX and TeXmacs is not yet perfect and style files are particularly problematic. What you can also do is write a TeXmacs style file by your own which supports the major extra constructs you want to use from the editors style file. When you convert your book to LaTeX, you next use the editors style. Some layout will probably need to be redone at that stage, but this should actually be the work of the editor... Please look in the TeXmacs help for more information about convertions between TeXmacs and LaTeX.