Hi all.
I'm having a lot of free time in this vacation so I was plannig to
work on something wich I call TeXmacs powered CAS documentation. The
idea is to convert some info and HTML files of CAS (like Maxima,
Yacas, etc) in TeXmacs documents. In this way, for example, when you
invoke help in that systems inside TeXmacs you get an interactive
document wich explains the use of the system, but the code of the CAS
refered to some function or example is in fact a session of that CAS
inside the TeXmacs powered doc. Something similar at the moment is
present in Maxima session where you can invoke the Manual, but it is
composed of HTML files, not files, the idea is convert them to to
bring them interactivity (for me the most appealing feature of
TeXmacs). The idea carries some questions, I hope you can help me:
* May be will be necesary to change some part of the documentation to
refer at the process inside TeXmacs, for example in the HTML version
of the Maxima Manual you see that for calling Maxima you type maxima
command at shell but you don't make this calling Maxima inside
TeXmacs, so a cosmetic change is required here. So do you know what is
the licence of the documentation for Maxima, Yacas, Octave, Scilab
(and similar CAS)?
* May be we can create some kind of info2html script (or use the
existing one) for showing info pages of CAS systems inside in a new
buffer. In that way we can have a nice hipertextual document output
instead of the long plain text response that at this moment we get.
Most of time after consulting this help we delete it because invoking
help is not the purpose of the document that we are writing with the
CAS, so having the output of that help in a separate buffers makes a
lot of sense to me. At the same time it gives the user a sense of
consistency of the scientific writer, because if you want to browse
help nicely you dont have to go to shell for that. (Is the same that
when you have the posibility to browse help files inside the konqueror
or nautilus file/internet browsers. The end user feels that is using a
integrate comprensive solution).
* Layers of document: At this moment we have some of this with the
idea of folding and unfolding. If we are making TeXmacs powered docs
may be we dont wish to show the code that produce a figure for
example, but we only want to show that figure. May be we can put that
code in a diferent layer and fold it and "above" that we can put the
output. Most of CAS programs can produce is some way a postscript
output of figures and TeXmacs can render postscript fine, will be nice
to have a "macro" wich make this process more automatic (creating a
figure from CAS commands and insert/link it to a TeXmacs document).
The idea of Layers can be extended to put, for example, in a inferior
layer the data of a stadistic problem and above the R session wich
handles that data. The files can be inserted or linked (like with
images files at the moment) so the user have the posibility to carry
in a simple document all the info he need to make his work.
I want to make some contribution in this vacation to CAS comunity
(specially using TeXmacs, the CAS glue ;-) ). I can help also with
localization to spanish for some doc, and I offered before to try to
make another Scheme interpreter work with TeXmacs, but I feel that the
TeXmacs powered doc can help to more people and is more suited to me.
Any advice or indication about where to start will be apreciated.
Cheers,
Offray