[OS X TeX] Next generation TeX

ADITYA D TRIVEDI atrivedi2 at student.gsu.edu
Tue Sep 7 00:46:42 CEST 2004


>On Sep 6, 2004, at 6:50 AM, Jérôme Laurens wrote:

> Coming back from TUG 2004, may I forward you some important question.
>
> For example, a TeX guru was missing a real dedicated programming 
> language with better access to data structure, someone else was 
> missing metapost like features and funny typesetting (typesetting text 
> along curves and not only lines...)
>
> Please, share your ideas.

1) Better Font Support

2) Better Unicode Support

3) Uniting different TeX forks: LaTeX, ConTeXt, XeTeX, etc. It would be nice to converge these different technologies if possible. An end user should not have to choose based on different feature sets. I am not sure if this is possible, but as an end user I want a cross platform XeTeX with all the features of LaTeX.

4) Seemless use of TeX related tools. I should have just one button which says Typeset/Compile and TeX figures out what needs to be run (for instance LaTeX, BibTeX, and LaTeX twice if necessary or just LaTeX once) without additional input.

5) Each front end (TeXShop, iTeXMac, WinEdt, Kile, etc) seems to have different conventions/macros/format to specify things like project root, gather files to form a tree of all related file. All this is done by abusing comments. A cleaner and standard way of doing such bookkeeping will help a great deal. That way switching front ends does not force me to learn new conventions.

6) Faster TeX? TeX in a way acts like an interpreted language. If there is a way to compile different files in a binary format to improve speeds, that might help. This will help a great deal in large projects. I know about the \include and \includeonly statements. However a lot more in terms of speed is desired.

Just a few lofty/contradictory desires from a naive LaTeX user.

-Eddy

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