Publishing software [LWN.net]

Publishing software

Posted Jan 2, 2003 7:24 UTC (Thu) by socket (guest, #43)
Parent article: TeXmacs 1.0.1 released

I just grabbed a copy of TeXmacs to look over and see if it fits my needs.
I've done a fair amount of work with LaTeX, and am happy with the results I've gotten but am somewhat unhappy with the hackery it requires. I'd love to be able to tweak with things in somewhat less of a code-render-recode cycle, and something more of what Pagemaker, InDesign, or Quark allow. LaTeX is, in some ways more powerful, in some ways less, but a GUI that uses a good layout model rather than providing Yet-Another-Word-Processor interface to the LaTeX backend could do incredible things.

This is a good start. I like what's been done here. TeXmacs has some very real potential, and I'd like to offer whatever help I can to the project.

I'd like some slightly higher-level interfaces, though. A little feature of Pagemaker that I particularly like is that text goes in a container which can wrap around things, be shaped funny, end halfway down a page, and then continue in another container several pages away. If part of the container gets resized, some of the text can get moved to another part of the container, on a different page. I'm sure the same can be done in LaTeX, but it would take me a long time to figure out exactly how to specify where the regions of the container are and the flow.

I don't know Pagemaker very well, and I know enough about TeX's boxes-and-glue to know that what I want is likely possible in the TeX model. It seems incredibly flexible. I guess it would help if there was a GUI for these sorts of things. Wouldn't it be great if we could take that mental image of springs and boxes, and put it on the screen? Insert a new object on the page, and *SPROING* - everything moves around to adjust for the difference.

Oh, and I need to be able to make page specifications: This is a book, printed on 5.5" x 8.5" pages, the actual text is 4 3/8" x 7.5". Set it up so the first page gets rendered on the left side of a landscape 8.5" x 11" page, and the last page on the right side. Proceed through sorting the pages so that each could be printed double-sided, then folded down the middle and stapled. I've spent a couple hours on this so far, and have had a hard enough time getting LaTeX to change the page size and dvips to recognize it - I can't seem to make dvips use the page size I give it with "-T", and I assume I'll be using some postscript-manipulation to actually put each page in the right place for this layout - front, back, left, right.

I just wish this were easier. These sorts of things aren't discussed in the books I've seen about LaTeX.

Any suggestions? (I'll ask in a more appropriate forum as well. I just wanted to point out some of the issues I've run into in typesetting under Linux.)

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