Hi Offray, Those are very interesting experiments. Thanks for posting them. For further comparison, I've taken your two examples and run them through my process. Here are some observations based on that, with the disclaimer that TeXmacs is new to me.
1. I output both your examples from within TeXmacs using File > Export > Latex. I ran these through tex4ht to produce jsmath without too many complaints and each produced final output. The titling information never came through (should be easy to fix) and the "mouse-fold" stuff from the "tmparmod" environment consistently caused complaints. I would bet that tex4ht could provide a configuration file for latex that is specific to TeXmacs. 2. I ran my custom script on the output to convert to Sage worksheets, the output is below, where I've renamed the files to tm- minimal and tm-maximal. There are obvious mistakes, but I think the output is good enough to suggest fine-tuning would be successful. Other than adding a title to each one, I haven't made any changes by hand. http://buzzard.ups.edu/sage/tm-minimal.sws http://buzzard.ups.edu/sage/tm-maximal.sws 3. It strikes me that TeXmacs should be a very good environment for authoring Sage worksheets where the amount of mathematics and text is proportionally greater than the amount of actual Sage code. Especially for students new to TeX, Sage and the command-line. 4. The PlasTeX html output is very nice, especially with the navigation elements, etc. However, the mathematical elements are embedded graphics files. I think a very strong advantage of jsmath is that it avoids this approach, which has been taken by numerous such converters, including Sphinx. As a simple illustration, try increasing the font size (Ctrl-+ in Firefox) in the PlasTeX HTML versus the SWS jsmath above and you should see the jsmath fonts scale nicely, while the math graphics files get the "jaggies". It would seem to me that it will be a lot of work to get PlasTeX html, with graphics, into jsmath for a Sage worksheet. 5. The TeXmacs file format is highly structured and clearly delineates a Sage "session" along with "input" and "output" blocks (use Document > View > Edit source tree). From very limited poking around, it would appear that there are hooks in TeXmacs to extend the conversion process to Latex. As an example, on my system /usr/share/texmacs/TeXmacs/plugins/maxima/packages/session/maxima.ts would appear to recognize a maxima session and extend the formatting there. The main hack in my process above is to mark off Sage cells for conversion to cells in the sws output. It would appear that it may be straightforward to have TeXmacs flag any embedded Sage sessions properly for further processing. I could see a TeXmacs wrapping a Sage session in (new) SageTeX environments, which would be useful in their own right, since then TeXmacs could be a way to author SageTeX documents. It should then be straightforward to have tex4ht implement the SageTeX environments as cells properly formatted for the sws format in the conversion to jsmath. 6. So, off the top of my head, I could imagine: (a) Iron out any kinks in TeXmacs output, like the tmparmod environment, or handle them in (c). (b) Create a TeXmacs "package" to extend its Latex conversion to properly mark off a sequence of Sage inputs and the possible output, perhaps in cooperation with Dan Drake and SageTeX. (c) Add a configuration file to tex4ht which creates the text version of a Sage worksheet from the output of (b). Since t4ht already builds jsmath this would mostly mean only adding support for SageTeX macros built in (b). (d) Build a tool to package up the text from (c) into the sws format (directories, archive format, etc). I do this by hand now via cut/ paste into a new worksheet, but such a tool would be trivial. 7. So in summary, this would have TeXmacs be the pretty front-end to Latex, with Sage sessions built-in. tex4ht would do 99% of the conversion to sws format. Authors could write in a helpful tool, with the power of Sage at hand, and distribute the results as Sage worksheets, again with Sage available to the reader. Rob --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-edu" group. To post to this group, send email to sage-edu@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to sage-edu+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-edu?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
