Repository of alternative citation/bibliography styles for TeXmacs

#1

Has anybody shared custom bibliography styles for TeXmacs? I don’t think I saw any on tm-forge.

I know there’s a manual section on creating custom bib styles, but it’s still a lot of work – for example if you want to do something like group citations together, which I don’t believe exists yet (i.e. convert [1,2,3,4] to [1-4].).

So, if you have created a bibliography style, it might be beneficial if you shared it here, or somewhere else online. Alternative bibliography styles is one of the first things people might be looking for when creating articles or books in TeXmacs.

#2

I created tm-forge to allow such kind of contributions. Anybody can contribute style files, journal templates or bibliography styles. It does not seems to be a lot of activity from users on this side. I’m not sure why. Other projects like Typsts albeit younger and in general less sophisticated than TeXmacs have a much greater “appeal” to the general public. Help on how to improve the situation is very welcome.

#3

A quick question: how would you make hyperlinks for [1-4]? I mean, when it is [1,2,3,4], each number is linked to its corresponding bibliographic item.

#4

I don’t know how one would come up with journal templates. I assume that this would happen only when a journal accepts TeXmacs source files, but seemingly they usually only accept LaTeX files.

#5

What do you mean? There are two sides to support journal templates: the first is to have a style to reproduce the typesetting rules of any given journal. The second is to specialise the LaTeX export as to produce a LaTeX file which uses correctly the template which usually journals provide for LaTeX.

There is a background mistake made quite often: people think that since journals only accepts LateX then one has to write in LaTeX, but this is not a necessity. Popular systems like Pandoc and Quarto shows that this is not the case. LaTeX is essentially a document exchange format, not more or less than PDF. Like you do not write PDF by hand, you should not be bound to write LaTeX by hand. TeXmacs conversion in LaTeX is good enough for usual workflows. Supporting journal templates means that we have to make it better in exporting with specific style files for each journal. I’m not sure this is the case now, but there is no fundamental technical problem in implementing it.

#6

In that particular example, you can simply hyperlink the 1 and the 4. That is what is typically done in that style.

#7

Yes, seems a reasonable compromise. And a preview would show all 4 references grouped together.

#8

I’m not aware of many people who use pandoc-generated documents to submit to journals. Pandoc often generates a lot of “noise” code that, while compiles correctly, breaks journal style guides.

The other problem is collaboration. People will often use the tool that generates the least amount of friction amount the members of the team, and usually that’s not even LaTeX, but MS Word.

An idea: Perhaps it’s better to focus on TeXmacs as a “typesetting” software (or Desktop Publishing, akin to Indesign, but focus on scientific texts), rather than anything else. Similar to your point, @mgubi , people forget or ignore the fact that TeX/LaTeX was never meant to be used as an authoring tool (which is bad for) but specifically a typesetting tool.

#9

I (and all the people in my group) use TeXmacs daily to produce scientific paper (and submit to journals). I’m interested in it because is my main working tool and it does the jobs perfectly. It allow me and many other people to produce scientific documents with a lot of complex formulas and collaborate effectively (e.g. during discussions via Zoom we can write equations on TeXmacs instead than using an iPad as a blackboard). What is currently missing is a reliable collaboration support. (it exists but cannot be easily used, and it need a server to exists which coordinate the various instances). I’m not sure why you think that TeXmacs has to be something else than what is designed to do. Or maybe better, I do not understand what is that you are proposing. What should we do differently?

#10

Nothing different on the software per se. I was talking about a “marketing” approach, in response to your original question on how to make it more appealing. I’m saying, instead of advertising it as a tool for writing journal articles, advertise simply as a typesetting software. I.e. a more broad approach. Which is what it was designed for, if I’m not mistaken.

1 Like
#11

Sorry I was not understanding what you meant. Marketing is our big problem, indeed. TeXmacs is meant to be a document preparation system, not partcularly as a tool to write journal articles, but this is the main task many researchers have to fulfil and they will not use different tools for similar tasks (e.g. to write lecture note vs. to write a paper) so I do not see how we can skip this issue. It is a quite natural requirement and other solutions (like Overleaf) are quite good at it. Personally I do not care much about having templates for journals, it is quite easy to export LaTeX and then spend one hour or less to conform it to the requirements of the editor, but not everybody thinks that way.

#12

Yes, an online collaboration tool would be helpful. Perhaps it might be possible to create in intermediate tool that compiles to PDF and sends it to a shared viewer online (while each user runs TeXmacs on their computer) in real time.

Another feature that would help is live spell checking. I know it sounds trivial, but it’s a big deal for a lot of people. Pretty much every editor has live spell checking now.

#13

Therefore authoring/typesetting/providing a format for archival IMHO, and TeXmacs does all of this.

#14

I think that there is also some feedback “in the system”, that is tm-forge is not well known, therefore not much used, therefore there is low motivation to contribute.

In the TeXmacs website at https://www.texmacs.org/tmweb/contribute/develop.en.html there is the right hint,

First of all, you may consider writing independent plug-ins for TeXmacs. These may either be interfaces with existing extern software, or enhancements to TeXmacs, like style files or new functionality written in the Guile/Scheme extension language.

but it needs to contain also IMHO “a way” for users that want to contribute and possibly do not want to be involved in the team. Right now, starting from that sentence, a user will have to offer their code to the other users on their own. This might lower motivation. In my opinion that could be the right place to put a nice link to tm-forge, saying perhaps that this is an unofficial archive.

#15

Yeah, that is why I posted this thread – kind of a reminder for people who might have stuff in the drives but have not shared it on tm-forge. Searching this forum I’ve seen people mention that they’ve created styles for X, Y, or Z purpose, but it has not been posted on tm-forge.

So if you have something, please post it. Even if it’s not perfect.

1 Like