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Fabrice Popineau
Fabrice.Popineau@supelec.fr
Marie-Louise Chaix
Marie-Louise.CHAIX@edpsciences.org
Thursday July 24, 2003
This talk will describe a project funded by the French Ministry for Education. This project aims at building a tightly integrated TeX + XEmacs distribution which will be distributed to French high schools. There is a growing demand by mathematics and physics teachers for a TeX based solution. The first target platform will be Windows, Linux being second. In order to draw as many people as possible to TeX, even novices, they must be provided with a package up to the standards of most word processors: the users will be exposed to only one application and not to dozens of binaries. Another point that keeps many people from using TeX is not so much the (La)TeX language itself, but that maintaining a TeX distribution is difficult and can be time consuming.
The XemTeX project has been submitted and accepted for funding to build a free platform that should be much easier to use than the current ones, based on the XEmacs editor and a subset of the current TeXLive distribution. The project will address several problems, including creating an enhanced XEmacs mode for typesetting TeX documents, tightly integrating the viewer into XEmacs and documenting the product. These points will be addressed in this talk, the current status of the project, and possibly how to get funding for such projects.