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There are many things that we would like to integrate in TeXmacs. On Savannah , we maintain a wish list with suggestions by users and other detailed wanted features. Here follows an incomplete list of more general directions for future development, as on may 31, 2019.

1. Typesetting

The typesetter should be reorganized and improved as follows:

Decouple the style-sheet language from the actual typesetter.

Better support for agglomerated documents (from physically different documents).

More types of dynamic objects, like animations, help balloons, etc.

Better line-breaking of large formulas.

2. Extra facilities for editing texts

Although cursor movement, selections, etc. have already been implemented, some other standard editing facilities have not yet been completed. Let us mention a few of these:

Mathematical facilities: simplification of a selected region, substitutions of formulas in other formulas, etc.

Grammar checkers and automatic translation programs. Does someone know where to find detailed free dictionaries and stuff like that?

Incorporation of a free speech recognition program.

3. Converters to other formats

There is a constant need for good converters from and to other data formats:

Of course, TeX/LaTeX cannot really be considered as a format (it is really a language with an ill defined grammar). Nevertheless it is important to have good heuristic converters in both directions. We still would appreciate help in this direction, in particular in order to support standard documents styles of various journals.

TeXmacs is also compatible with Html , but some things such as forms have not been implemented yet. The importation of tables could also be further improved and it would be nice if the importer could support cascaded style sheets.

It would be nice to have converters for the document formats used by Open Office , Word , and the internal formats used by important publishers such as Elsevier .

It would be nice to have converters for various markdown formats as used by sites such as Wikipedia . Similarly, it would be nice to have an interface for Jupyter notebooks.

We would appreciate help for writing a converter from TeXmacs to the Texinfo format, which is the standard documentation format for the GNU project.

4. Technical pictures

We have started to include a facility for drawing technical pictures, but the responsable developer (Henri Lesourd ) is currently no longer part of the TeXmacs team. It would be nice to rewrite parts of the tool and extend it further so as to allow for the definition of graphical macros. This would allow users to define new geometrical constructions. It would for instance be possible to write a style file for drawing electronic circuits or chemical components with a nice icon bar for selecting circuits or components, just as you select lines and circles in usual pictures.

5. Presentation mode

We wish to further extend the laptop presentation mode into the following directions:

A larger number of themes.

Implementation of transitions between slides.

Further improvements for the animation editor.

We would also very much appreciate help on artwork and the design of nice themes.

6. Tools for usage on the web and in networks

It would be nice to have a better integration of TeXmacs with the web. As a first step, we need a clean internal plug-in for Wget or Curl with support for cookies, security, etc. At a second stage, the Html converters should be improved to take advantage of this. After that, we may think about things like collaborative authoring via the web, integration with preprint servers, etc.

Another interesting thing would be to incorporate tools for live conferencing inside TeXmacs. We actually expect this to be quite easy and this would open a different road towards collaborative authoring, instant messenging, etc.

7. Interface with computer algebra systems

The following improvements should still be made in order to link TeXmacs to computer algebra systems:

Improving the layout of computer algebra sessions.

Add extra features to increase the interoperability between TeXmacs and computer algebra systems and to give additional control over the layout of big output.

More semantics for the objects being communicated. This may either be high level information (like HTML 4.0 mathematical markup or Openmath) or low level information (including information about the representation of data), depending on the required speed.

Further possibilities for evolution concern syntax highlighting, debugging facilities and so on.

8. TeXmacs on tablets and mobile phones

After the release of TeXmacs 2.1, we wish to upgrade TeXmacs to Qt 5, which should allow the deployment on new platforms such as Android . This also opens the road for a specific interface for tablets and mobile phones.

© 1999–2019 by Joris van der Hoeven