Re: [Texmacs-dev] TeXmacs server

[Joris van der Hoeven]

On Fri, Jun 02, 2006 at 08:13:26AM -0500, Offray Vladimir Luna Cárdenas wrote:
> Is nice to see the TeXmacs Wiki idea. None of the Wikis I know have a 
> nice WYSIWYG/WYSIWYM to enable mathematical writing. I was thinking in 
> TeXmacs as an external editor of some of the existing wikis (my prefered 
> one is Moin). In this case, we would need some kind of server client 
> protocol to talk with the Wiki saying to it wich will be the kind of 
> content that wil be added and may be some kind of mime type or 
> preferences in our wiki account will say what is our prefered editor for 
> this kind of content. This would mean also that we would need a general 
> system for seeing differences between changes in documents, in a more 
> general fashion that the actual Wikis. May be wikis based on SVN, like 
> Trac or SVNwiki would be more suited for this kind of vision. In the 
> case of the contents generated by TeXmacs, would be nice to have the 
> posibility to put some kind of forms for the input in CAS sessions, so 
> the web user of TeXmacs Documents could use CAS via web and see the 
> output in a nice fashion.
>
> ¿How you envision that the effort of TeXmacs Wiki could be integrated 
> with previous/other wiki engines?

I don't. We discussed that with Alvaro a long time ago.
The point is that if you want to be able to edit the pages
with another editor than TeXmacs, then using the TeXmacs format
will cause a lot of problems. When using a non-TeXmacs format,
then it has to be very clean, so that the converters are 100% safe.
But this means that a lot of functionality will be lost.

On the other hand, if someone has the courage to develop a reliable
format which can be used both by TeXmacs and other Wiki engines,
then it will not be hard to add it. The TeXmacs server is an independent
project from TeXmacs: small and very modular. It will be easy to add
extra conversion services.

Another thing which may be done quite easily is to automatically generate
Html/Xhtml/MathML/Pdf pages with the same content as the pages on the Wiki.
For the extern non TeXmacs world, these exported pages cannot be edited.
But at least you can browse them with other software.

> Pdt: About translations, I would like to say something more, as one of 
> the main translators of spanish documentation. The Wiki Way is the Way 
> for me to make the translations easily available for a lot of people and 
> integrated with localiced versions of TeXmacs, but we need some kind of 
> "transwiki" wich can say wich paragraphs are in correspondence with 
> original doc, and wich ones are outdated. Po4a has a lot of nice 
> reflexions on the translation of Free Software issues.

I agree (and thanks for the pointer). In fact, I did several experiments
last weeks. There are two main issues:
  * How to upgrade the existing documentation to a better format.
  * What kind of format is suitable for maintaining translations of
    ever changing originals.
As a conclusion, I think that one needs to build dictionaries which
map trees into translated trees, where the source trees are as small
as possible (paragraphs, or even sentences).

I managed to build such dictionaries for the existing translations,
but the success is heavily dependent on the way things were translated.
For the Spanish documentation, I managed to recover about 2/3 of the mapping.
For the German translations, almost nothing, because the translator wanted
to do too good a job by rephrasing things, adding examples, etc.
which makes it hard to obtain a good correspondance automatically.

At any rate, I temporarily gave up the improvement of the translation process,
because I fear it to be quite tricky and time consuming. If I had one month
of time, then I could do a very nice job. But unfortunately, I don't.