The XE TEX Project
Contents
1. for our goal Following the general philosophy we won t rewrite big parts of existing stuff but rather tailor and wrap up the existing tools As an exception to this rule and as a specific sub part an equation editor has been considered Given our targeted audience it could be a fancy and useful tool to provide people with A first sketch has been written in wxPython to be portable If it appears that the result is stable enough under both platforms it will be integrated into the XEmTX product Apart from typing in TeX documents the user will have to handle other kinds of files images and graphics The related tasks will also be identified and the common ones will be offered through menus and toolbars For ex ample MetaPost is a nice tool to draw graphics and sup port should be provided for it inside XEmacs Viewing documents T X is not a WYSIWYG tool which is a bit disturbing for people who don t know it yet Specific attention will be paid to coupling the compiler and the viewer Up to now DVI and PDF have been the output formats considered The DVI format has the advantage to be fast to display on screen but the drawback not to be self contained fonts images are stored externally For the PDF format it is the opposite The status of viewers available on TEX Live is not the same under Windows and under Unix The XDvi viewer for Unix is able to display Type 1 fonts and to use source specials to map a location in the2. the removal and the maintenance of the product on each platform 2 a quick starting guide which will describe how to typeset a document as quickly as possible 3 auser manual which will describe in details what is possible at each step of the creation of a document and the technical aspects of XEMTEX Current status of the project The project has officially started November 2002 for 18 months We did not require a lot of manpower and it is a small project among the RNTL funded projects To make progress we are adopting an iterative process rather than tackle the whole problem at once at the risk of end ing nowhere we prefer to finalise small parts and release often The XEmTEX Project Hopefully the first 0 1 release of XEmTEX will be available for the 2003 Euro TFX conference 3 Once the initial framework is set up we will build much more eas ily on top of it Conclusion We think that TeX deserves to get a much broader audi ence than is the case now The price to pay to get high quality typesetting is not that expensive It may even be cheaper than the price to pay for using some commercial products which are less reliable The national funding we have got enables us to make a further step in simpli fying the access to TeX for many people through the use of free software We hope that the TEX community will stand together and require bigger funding to revive the TEX ideas into much more modern programs that could
3. like many free projects it was to be developed in the free time of people who were already busy so it came to noth ing As we wanted to ground this project a bit more than the average free software project the question arose about the viability of the project and how to fund it At the same time the French government brought us an 416 TUGboat Volume 24 2003 No 3 Proceedings of Euro TEX 2003 opportunity though the so called National Network on Software Technologies In short projects eligible to be funded must involve at least one company and one aca demic institution Projects can fall in one of several cat egories I pre competitive projects which should lead to final products at the end of the project 2 research projects to develop new technologies or new algorithms The XEMT X project did not fall into either of these categories in any obvious way However the RNTL al lowed for a third kind of projects to be presented free software projects They even released an economic study of the various business models for free software distribu tion with the clear intention to support some free soft ware projects So this was the opportunity we were looking for and partners to develop and submit the project were quickly found e Fabrice Popineau teaches at Supelec http www supelec fr an academic institution in the field of electrical engineering He has been working on the TEX Live project for several y
4. the pieces exist free of proprietary rights to assemble a high quality typesetting platform that would outperform many commercial programs for our kind of documents and that is the first goal of the project The second goal of the project is to widen the TEX audience by providing people with an integrated plat form easy to use even for novice users As a matter of fact for many people TEX is more difficult to install and maintain than it is to use Typing in some TX docu ment can be explained quite easily and it does not require any system administrator skill It is not the same when it comes to actually putting the TEX software or any of the related tools needed on the machine Any TX distri bution is made up of thousands of files and conflicts can arise easily Many get frustrated when they fail to install it at first try and it gets even worse if they actually spend time trying to fix problems unless they manage to do it By using XEmacs as an integrator we can isolate our TEX system from the rest of the software installed on the ma chine and the user will more likely get a working pro gram So we claim that if T X was as easy to install as other programs are TFX would have more users The project will rely on software components al ready available from the community and any new devel opments will be made available to the community free of rights In the end the XEmT KX project will be inte grated to the TFX Live proje
5. The XEMmTEX Project Marie Louise Chaix EDP Sciences Paris mlchaix edpsciences com http www fptex org xemtex Fabrice Popineau Sup lec Metz fabrice popineau supelec fr http www fptex org xemtex Abstract We are presenting the XEmTpX project which is funded by the French government under the RNTL program National Network on Software Technologies The purpose of the project is to provide a high quality user friendly free integrated typesetting platform to typeset scientific or technical documents R sum Nous pr sentons ici le projet XEMTEX qui a t retenu pour tre financ par le gouvernement fran ais dans le cadre du R seau National des Technologies Logicielles Ce projet a pour objectif de fournir une plateforme typographique int gr e libre facile d acc s et de haute qualit pour la mise en page de documents scientifiques et techniques Why XEMTFX TeX has been available and used by many people for 25 years by now so it must have some strength and it must outperform its competitors But there are not so many TEX vendors It is not mainstream among desktop pub lishing software or text processing software for several reasons o IX is a programming language which makes the learning curve much steeper o TEX is useful for complex typesetting jobs with lots of mathematics or complex typography but many people have jobs that do not require the complexity of TEX e TFX source
6. XEMTEX installer should not offer many options we may think of something much simpler for both cases However it appears that those platforms are really different in several system aspects file asso ciations icons menus and so on so that it seems dif ficult to have only one installer More precisely each platform offers services to install applications and these services are different So the answer is that a native in staller should be built on each platform Given our tar gets that means a Debian package will be built under De bian Linux and a MSI Microsoft Installer package will be built under Windows Editing text The starting point here is XEmacs and the AUC IEX and Preview BTFX packages As powerful as XEmacs may be some aspects of the user interaction may seem a bit strange or uneasy to novice users think about dialog through the minibuffer or complex key se quences for example This is partly due to the fact that emacsen have been used mainly by programmers that understand this way of thinking and partly by the fact emacsen can run in console mode and no effort has been made to build a simplified user interaction mode Emac sen are complex tools for complex jobs But it would be a shame if the most powerful text editor could not be tai lored to suit the needs of less experienced people So this part of the project will tackle the problem of ergonomics and definition of menus toolbars and keymaps suitable
7. code is free since it has been given to the community by its author D E Knuth There are not so many commercial supported versions of TEX it is essentially used in the academic community in its free form TEX distributions have been floating around for free for a very long time They used to be difficult to install and to maintain Much progress has been made in the recent years One of the very first complete and well designed distributions of TFX was named em TX from its author Eberhard Mattes and targeted MS DOS This distribu tion of TX had the advantage of fitting on only a few floppy disks It was solid well integrated with the envi ronment and had a lot of success Then teTEX brought Unix users a complete and sound set of programs and style files much more exten sive than the set provided with em TFX Since 1994 Thomas Esser has done a great job in smoothing over the installation of TFX especially if we consider that in the tradition of Unix programs you get the sources and it is up to you to compile and install everything Thomas Esser s distribution is based on the Web2C sources of TEX maintained by Karl Berry and now by Olaf Weber and it is completed by several scripts and programs help ing a lot with use configuration and maintenance of TEX Windows users have different requirements than Unix users The level of technical knowledge is not gen erally the same For example Windows users do not ex
8. ct The XEmTEX CD ROM resulting from the project will be sent to all high school teachers mathematics and science by the GUTenberg association The road to XEmMTEX Framework All the needed tools to build a complete en vironment are freely available TEX Live under Win dows used to try to help people with installing the most frequently needed tools e atext editor to select among halfa dozen WinShell WinEdt etc e the Ghostscript PostScript interpreter either in its free or non free version image files tools like NetPBM or ImageMagick e the Spell spell checker with dictionaries Perl because many scripts use it and it is not available by default under Windows But this list of supplementary programs was difficult to maintain mainly because these products were not repackaged and their installation procedure kept chang ing Also they were not mandatory and their installa tion was not delegated to the TeX Live system they in stalled as standalone products at the risk of conflicting with other versions Anyway the starting point of the project is a subset of the TFX Live 7 CD ROM augmented with XEmacs TUGboat Volume 24 2003 No 3 Proceedings of Euro TEX 2003 417 Marie Louise Chaix and Fabrice Popineau and the packages relevant to TFX typesetting and the supplementary tools cited above The goal of the project is by no means to write lots of new programs but rather to put glue between existing progra
9. ears Marie Louise Chaix is Project Leader at EDP Sci ences http www edpsciences org a French publisher specializing in scientific journals books and electronic publishing In her company many people are potential professional users of the result ing product and will bring their desires and exper tise into its design We submitted the XEmT xX project with the following arguments First of all there are very few commercial DTP and text processing programs that are very widely spread the most common being MSWord So any new prod uct has little chance to gain an audience But in the particular domain of scientific and technical documents those widespread commercial programs have poor per formance If you want high quality typesetting then you must resort to TEX It will provide the required quality in whatever notation system you need maths physics languages from all around the world music etc Being programmable TeX has been able to adapt to new tech nologies like PDF and HTML When it comes to text editors you can t avoid speak ing about the Emacs family The emacsen stability and versatility is well known As they are programmable they can be tailored to anyobdy s use Even if the stan dard way to interact with an emacs is difficult to learn and maybe not that intuitive today key sequences it is possible to reprogram this and turn it into something more suited to our needs The XEmTEX Project So all
10. find their way in the mainstream of DTP programs 3 Updated since you can download the current version from http www fptex org xemtex TUGboat Volume 24 2003 No 3 Proceedings of Euro TEX 2003 419
11. ig an idea for experienced computer users but the fundamental con cept is that this environment could be distributed to less experienced computer users Let s reserve some of the details for the moment The main point is that the user could access his typesetting environment just by clicking on an icon on the desktop as is the case for most DTP programs and that s a big selling point in our opinion TEX and all the machinery would remain hidden behind the scene Free software and funding Not everyone is interested in TFX and TX is not the right answer for everyone However for certain types of jobs or types of documents TEX has no competitors Education is a target for TEX for several reasons e obviously for mathematics and science teachers be cause of the high quality result in typesetting maths e stability and long lasting documents TEX has been available for 25 years and the input language does not change with each version like most commercial products e it is free and available on all platforms For a few years there has been a growing de mand from teachers especially from high schools towards GUTenberg for hints on how to start with TEX Part of this demand is due to the growing popularity of free operating systems like Linux GUTenberg had a project to build a dedicated CD ROM and distribute it through the national education system in every high school in France However this was a free project and
12. kages and style files or related tools But the novelty was that you could run the tools from the CD ROM without installing anything Moreover almost all frequently used architec tures were available several Unixes Windows MS DOS and Amiga up to some point Mac OS X nowadays But all these distributions target only the TX pro grams and related tools They do not target the full en vironment needed to actually typeset documents To our knowledge only the 4All TEX project had this am bition in the past The 4Al TEX CD ROMs brought you a complete environment under Windows to type in com pile and print your documents Everything was included from the editor to the printer drivers and including tools to handle images or to draw graphs a spell checker etc The wonderful idea was to write a set of wizards that assisted you in your most common tasks Everything was configurable so that you could choose your text editor or your TX engine and so on The result was a nice envi ronment really easy to work with Unfortunately this project stopped circa 1999 Having worked on the TX Live project for many years trying to bring Windows users with a comprehen sive up to date and sound TFX distribution we won dered how to turn this distribution into something closer to a Windows application than has been the case till now Windows users like Microsoft Word or any other DTP program because when it is installed there is only one icon o
13. ms and package the result so that it is easy to use for anybody Relying on several large complex products like TEX XEmacs we are forced to play safe with updates to these products That means we can t patch them heavily to suit our needs except if we can make sure the patches will find their way in the main distribution That is why it is better to use the glue strategy than the patch strategy For its T X part XEmTEX will be a proper sub set of TEX Live only the most commonly used pack ages as few binaries as possible nothing related to bit map PK fonts The other parts have already been named XEmacs for integrating everything Ghostscript Image Magick and NetPBM The project has been split into several tasks which are described below The goal is to get progressively closer to the final XEmT EX product Installer Lots of work has already been done in the TEX Live project regarding installation especially about spec ification of packages and writing so called TPM files XEmTXX should be very simple to install hence should offer as few options as possible to the user contrary to TeX Live which offers lots of options to the user TEX Live installers for Windows and for Unix are very different it is an application with a graphical user interface under Windows and a shell script running in text mode under Unix It has been unclear for a long time if a portable installer was feasible and desirable Given that the
14. n the desktop to click and all functionality is avail able from there The application is compact and the in teraction is clear Obviously TX being much older and free software it cannot compete with such a facility of use However it seemed that it should be possible to re duce the gap between both kinds of programs There are free text editors that are both well inte grated with their environment and with cross platform availability The most well known freely available text editor is probably GNU Emacs But we would not qual ify it as well integrated with its environment Using GNU Emacs under Windows may seem a bit strange to Windows users mostly because it does not take advan tage of native controls native toolbars or other common controls On the other hand there is extensive support for TEX documents inside Emacs Fortunately there is an alternative to GNUEmacs XEmacs is a forked project from GNU Emacs 18 series It started as Lucid Emacs and then became XEmacs The difference between the emacsen is mostly in the internals and the external as pects but they share many features and a lot of the feel part of the look and feel The look part is much more in keeping with the environment under XEmacs especially if we consider the Windows native version and the GTK version So the big idea came that XEmacs could act as an integrated environment for writing compiling and print ing TEX documents Well this is not so b
15. pect to interact with the computer through the com mand line don t even think of making them compile their programs Windows and MacOS advertise their graphical user interface Unlike MacOS up to version g Windows has a builtin command interpreter even quite a fancy one under the NT 2K XP flavours of Windows but although it exists only a few users know how to use it TEX being a compiler which is invoked through the command line Windows and MacOS users expect it to 1 Things have changed only recently with the advent of Linux distributions and the availability of precompiled packages TUGboat Volume 24 2003 No 3 Proceedings of Euro TEX 2003 415 Marie Louise Chaix and Fabrice Popineau be wrapped up ina GUI application Dedicated text edi tors have been devised to this effect other ones have been adapted to it Mik TEX and fpIFX are the main free versions of TEX for Windows MiK TEFX is an entirely new port of TEX to Windows whereas fpIFX is based on the very same sources as te TEX and Web2C These distributions are now much larger than emtex they do not fit on flop ples but on CD ROMs In the meantime the TEX com munity has developed lots of new tools and macro pack ages which explains the inflation During all these years another project was born to deliver a full ready to run version of TFX on CD ROM the TEX Live project This project aimed at being the most complete set of TEX programs macro pac
16. viewer to the same place in the source file Windvi available for Win dows does not yet have those features However we can wonder if the DVI format should be advertised as the for mat of choice for new users especially if it were possible to view with the PDF format and the same source specials mechanism feature Heiko Oberdiek has implemented such a mechanism in his vpe package What needs to be investigated is can it be reasonably used Is it fast is it convenient If yes no doubt the PDF format should be advertised over the DVI format What we want to avoid at any price is the use of bitmap font files The mechanism to build these fonts is too complex too error prone Nowadays with scalable fonts we can completely avoid using bitmap fonts and thus avoid installing METAFONTand all the programs calling it like mktexpk In any case the Windvi viewer will eventually be brought up to the same level of features as the XDvi viewer 2 The source special mechanism is available but not docu mented 418 TUGboat Volume 24 2003 No 3 Proceedings of Euro TEX 2003 Documentation Documentation is the weak point about TEX there is too much of it and it is difficult for a new user to get started So a specific effort will be devoted to write a clear set of documentation to bring people in the game We won t rewrite a TEX or BTFX primer but namely I an installation guide which will describe precisely the installation
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