1.Frequently asked questions

Overview

• General

  • What is TeXmacs?

  • For what typical purposes do people use TeXmacs?

  • What Operation Systems are supported?

  • What are the system requirements?

  • I have already learned TeX/LaTeX and Emacs, do I have to learn all over again?

  • I have a question, where should I ask it?

  • Is it free Software?

  • When will TeXmacs be based on Qt5 and Guile 2?

• Troubleshooting

  • TeXmacs used to work, but suddenly refuses to be launched. What should I do?

• System Appearance and Behavior

  • How can I see the LaTeX or TeX code corresponding to what I see on the screen?

  • Trying to start TeXmacs remotely over a ssh connection, I get an error, while e.g. xclock works without a problem?

  • TeXmacs is unusually slow while editing?

• Windows and Cygwin specific

  • My Windows username contains spaces. Will this cause problems?

  • What to do with Cygwin specific questions?

  • How to associate .tm files with TeXmacs inside Cygwin?

  • How to get spell checking working inside Cygwin?

• Usage

  • How to mark/select a whole paragraph?

  • Spell checking always starts at the beginning of the document?

  • How can I insert an OpenOffice.org table?

  • How can I insert the number of pages?

  • How can I resize an image?

• Microtypography

  • There is too much space after an abbreviation like wrt. or etc.?

  • How to add unbreakable space?

• Legacy Questions

  • A publisher sent me a giant LaTeX preamble I'm supposed to put in in order to prepare a book for them. What is the best way of putting it in and figuring if it will work?

General

Question 1. What is TeXmacs?

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.

Question 2. For what typical purposes do people use TeXmacs?

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.

Question 3. What Operation Systems are supported?

Answer. TeXmacs can be easily installed on all major systems, such as GNU/Linux, MacOS and Windows. 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.

Question 4. What are the system requirements?

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.

Question 5. I have already learned TeX/LaTeX and Emacs, do I have to learn all over again?

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 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 Ctrl+XCtrl+S for saving a file, or Ctrl+_ for undo will work.

Question 6. I have a question, where should I ask it?

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.

Question 7. Is it free Software?

Answer. TeXmacs falls under the GNU public licence.

Question 8. When will TeXmacs be based on Qt5 and Guile 2?

Answer. TeXmacs already works quite well with Qt5, but several issues remain to be fixed. TeXmacs 2.1 will still be based on Qt4, but TeXmacs 2.2 will be based on Qt5.

As to Guile, please be aware that Guile 1 and Guile 2 carry the same name, but that resemblances very much end there: Guile 2 has a completely different design, which breaks the interface with TeXmacs. Porting our interface to Guile 2 requires a lot of work and it is possible that this will never be done. Since Guile 1 is no longer supported by many standard Linux distributions, recent versions of TeXmacs directly include Guile 1. We will continue to do so until we find time to switch to a more recent version of Guile or to another Scheme implementation.

Troubleshooting

Question 9. TeXmacs used to work, but suddenly refuses to be launched. What should I do?

Answer. Something strange must have happened. You may try the following remedies, in the given order:

1. Try to open TeXmacs with the –setup option:

   texmacs --setup

2. Rename your ~/.TeXmacs directory (you may also delete it, but that will irrevocably destroy all your preferences) and relaunch the editor. If you use Windows, then we note that you have no ~/.TeXmacs directory, but the hidden AppData\Roaming\TeXmacs subdirectory of your home directory plays the same role.

3. Try reinstalling TeXmacs, preferably the latest version that used to work for you. Old versions can be found at http://ftp.texmacs.org/pub/TeXmacs/tmftp/

4. Submit a bug report, report the issue to one of our mailing lists, or contact the authors.

System Appearance and Behavior

Question 10. How can I see the LaTeX or TeX code corresponding to what I see on the screen?

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.

Question 11. Trying to start TeXmacs remotely over a ssh connection, I get an error, while e.g. xclock works without a problem?

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.

Question 12. TeXmacs is unusually slow while editing?

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

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.

Windows and Cygwin specific

Question 13. My Windows username contains spaces. Will this cause problems?

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.

Question 14. What to do with Cygwin specific questions?

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/.

Question 15. How to associate .tm files with TeXmacs inside 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.

Question 16. How to get spell checking working inside Cygwin?

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

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

Usage

Question 17. How to mark/select a whole paragraph?

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.

Question 18. Spell checking always starts at the beginning of the document?

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

Question 19. How can I insert an OpenOffice.org table?

Answer.

1. Create a PostScript image of your table using OpenOffice (FilePrintPrint 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.

Question 20. How can I insert the number of pages?

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

Question 21. How can I resize an image?

Answer. Put your cursor right behind the image and edit the fields in the lowest icon bar. 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. The remaining two fields specify the -offset and -offset of the image. By default, images are aligned at the bottom. When specifying -0.5h for the last field, the image will be vertically aligned at the center.

Microtypography

Question 22. There is too much space after an abbreviation like wrt. or etc.?

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 Alt+A. To care for this while writing: Alt+AETC..

Question 23. How to add unbreakable space?

Answer. Type Meta+/ after the space.

Remaining legacy questions

Question 24. A publisher sent me a giant LaTeX preamble I'm supposed to put in in order to prepare a book for them. What is the best way of putting it in and figuring if it will work?

Answer. I recommend 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 conversions between TeXmacs and LaTeX.