On this page, I list some tasks for which help from the TeXmacs community would be appreciated. Except for the actual development, no particular technical skills should be required. Most of the items on the list can be dealt without too much interference with the core developers.

1.Organizational issues

1.1.Maintainance tasks

Bug and wish lists

The mere task of reproducing bugs from the Savannah bug list is very time consuming. It would be nice if more people could be involved in checking whether some items are not simply outdated or irrelevant. Easy bugs could also directly be fixed by TeXmacs hackers. Similarly, it should be checked whether some of the wishes are not already implemented in a more recent version.

News

It would be nice if somebody could take care of important announcements concerning TeXmacs, as well as the diffusion of announcements of new versions on all appropriate media.

Plug-ins

This task consists of regularly testing the available plug-ins for TeXmacs, to maintain the list of those plug-ins that work, and to report possible problems to the maintainers of the respective plug-ins. It would also be nice to check the portability of the plug-ins and to verify that the documentation is up to date.

Internationalization

Menu items and messages are automatically translated into the user's language, as long as the dictionary for that language is complete. We are looking for people who would be willing to maintain the available dictionaries and make sure that the missing translations are added when we approach a major release of TeXmacs.

1.2.Publicity

Presence on the web

Via news (see above), but also on more institutional websites (such as the CNRS, Inria, Digiteo, Polytechnique, or various educational « rectorats » in France; and similar(?) institutions abroad).

Database with contacts

Email database with addresses of people to contact when releasing new major versions (typically system engeneers at universities).

Articles on TeXmacs

Publishing introductory articles on TeXmacs in various media.

Promotional articles

T-shirts, cups, brochures, etc.

1.3.Education and training

Presentations

Demonstrations of TeXmacs at high schools, universities and other meetings, such as the annual meeting of mathematics professors in France.

Training

« Stages de formation » for teachers and scientists.

Educational material

Dedicated documentation for teachers, but also sample TeXmacs documents for use at high schools. Better ways to share such material.

1.4.Association for TeXmacs and Mathemagix

We would to create an association for the promotion of TeXmacs and Mathemagix. This requires a proposal for the « statuts » of such an association, the verification by a legal expert, the creation of the association, and regular (at least annual) meetings of the members. Having an association would facilitate several things: selling documentation or other services, receiving donations, merchandizing (T-shirts, cups, etc.), spending money without the administrative burden of public institutions.

2.Documentation

2.1.Maintainance tasks

Frequently asked questions

We are looking for a new person who would be willing to maintain the FAQ list.

External contributions

We are also looking for someone to maintain a list with available contributed documentation and making it available at the web site. This documentation typically includes tutorials, extra documentation in specific languages or specific target groups (e.g. teachers or students), or sample documents.

Videos

It would be nice to constitute and maintain a collection of videos for teaching TeXmacs and demonstrating some of the more advanced facilities.

Translations

We need someone to coordinate the translation effort for TeXmacs.

Plug-ins

We need someone to check the completeness and up-to-dateness of the documentation of the various TeXmacs plug-ins.

3.Development

3.1.For next stable release

Bug correction

Help to correct known open bugs on Savannah and implement open items on the wish list.

Portability

Help to correct portability issues under Windows, MacOS and other more exotic operating systems. What about TeXmacs on tablets?

Unicode support

We are looking for people who could assist us when we will make successive moves to full support of Unicode. There are several subtasks: moving support for Cyrillic languages to Unicode; more systematic use of Unicode fonts; completion of translation tables between Unicode and the current TeXmacs encoding.

User interface

Good ideas for improving the user interfaces and patches whenever possible are welcome. We are still in the process of making the user interface more standard.

3.2.New features

BibTeX mode

A mode for editing bibliography files. A more ambitious plan is to write a more general Scheme (or C++) interface between TeXmacs and data bases for maintaining auxiliary information.

Translation tool

A tool for translating pieces of documentation paragraph by paragraph (or piece by piece), similar to the automatic difference tool. Translations might be stored in a data base which would allow for more fine-grained updates on changes. We might also want to interface TeXmacs with external translation tools for obtaining proposals of default translations.

Versioning tools

Built-in support for SVN, Git, Arch, etc.

Collaborative document site

Collaborative authoring (e.g. a TeXmacs wiki).

Plug-ins

General development of plug-ins and better support for plug-ins.

3.3.Development tools

Debugging tools

It would be nice to improve the tools for debugging TeXmacs, such as backtraces, jumping to lines in the source code, saving core dumps, more graceful treatment of unexpected situations (instead of segfaulting), recover from certain segfaults, storing debugging and tracing information in memory and tools for visualizing this information, etc.

Automatic code analysis

Implementation of tools for analyzing the TeXmacs source code. For instance, the following things could be done automatically:

• Generation of the list of textual menu items and messages which need to be translated into other languages.

• The automatic generation of documentation whenever possible (e.g. lists with all active keyboard shortcuts, menus, or TeXmacs macros in the current style).

• Automatic generation of the list of all TeXmacs symbols (which should be present in the Unicode conversion tables).

Regression testing

It would be nice to do extensive regression testing on key features such as LaTeX and Html conversion. In particular, we need to constitute a database with interesting documents for testing purposes, such as TeXmacs documents which exhaustively demonstrate certain features.

Autotools

Full support of automake?