Hi there, over the past few weeks I have been using TeXmacs extensively for preparing slides for an important talk. From that, I gathered a number of experiences that i would like to share. Several of these things have probably been discussed before. Still several weeks of power-usage might put them into a new perspective.
First, the general impression: TeXmacs definitely is fit for demanding production use. There is room for improvement in details, but apart from that, TeXmacs definitely is a mature environment to do real work. Now as for the several aspects where I see room for improvement: 1) Positioning of elements preparing slides means arranging pictures, text, formulas and graphical elements onto a page. For this it would be a huge improvement to have floating elements that can be freely positioned on the page using the mouse. What I imagine is a floating box element that is anchored somewhere in the text, has a position either relative to the anchor itself, contains arbitrary multiparagraph content and can be moved and resized freely by mouse. It should be simply layered on top or below the other content without influencing the flow of other elements. 2) Indication of table layout with by viewing "grid lines" When moving through a document with the cursor, you always nicely see the light cyan or purple lines of text regions that you have entered. I would propose one simple but extremely helpful extension to this: When entering a table with the cursor, there should not only be a solid line around the whole table, but a grid of dashed lines between all the cells of this table. 3) Behavior of multiparagraph content in table cells lacking a way to freely position elements, I instead used tables to do the page layout, making extensive use of multiparagraph cells. Unfortunately, multiparagraph text in a cell is limited to compared to regular text in several respects: * you cannot align individual paragraphs (left, right, centered, block) with respect to the width of the cell * elements that usually span the paragraph width (like equation, hrule or sub-tables set to span paragraph width) do not adjust to the width of the surrounding cell but still have the full width of the page. 4) Pressing <return> inside a table cell Currently, when you press <return> inside a regular (not multi-paragraph) cell, it does the same as <Alt>-<down>. Instead, I would propose to make it automatically convert the cell to multi-paragraph and work within the cell. Maybe, this is a matter of taste, but for my working habits, this would make a lot of sense: why do you need two different key-combinations for creating new rows? Why should you dig through menus to make cells multi-paragraph? (Or is there another simple way to switch a cell to multi-paragraph that I missed?) 5) adding markup for multiple paragraphs Do the following: * mark a single word * press <backslash> * type "bf" * press <return> This works perfectly not only for "bf" but many other kinds of markup (also "with" and others) Now try this: * mark two consecutive paragraphs * press <backslash> -> the marking is ignored!!! Why doesn't this very convenient way of adding markup work for more than one paragraph? ------------------ So much for now. There were other points as well, but the most important things are said. Greetings, and thanks again for creating TeXmacs. It really worked great for me, and I can only hope that this report may help improving it even further. Norbert _______________________________________________ Texmacs-dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/texmacs-dev
