Updating all Fold Executables inside a TeXmacs document

#1

Is there a way to update all Fold Executables inside a TeXmacs document?

I would like to use TeXmacs for generating a dynamic report on a dataset including for example the mean of a variable.
There aren’t many tools which support this kind of workflow and I recently discovered Folds as a very interesting feature of TeXmacs.
The dataset is stored in a external text file. In case a new measurement is added to this file, a possibilty to manually trigger the update (i.e. re-render) the Folds would be very helpful.

#2

This is the beginning of an answer.

Define a function which tests for Scheme executable folds that are in “output” state

(tm-define (exec-scheme-output? t) (and (tree-is? t 'script-output) (equal? (tree->stree (tree-ref tt 0))  "scheme")))

Execute a search applying this function as a search filter and assign the output to the list e-trees

(define e-trees (tree-search (buffer-tree) exec-scheme-output?))

Apply to all elements of the list the function alternate-toggle twice

(for-each (lambda (t) (begin (alternate-toggle t) (alternate-toggle t))) e-trees)

May be there is a better way than applying alternate-toggle twice, but I did not yet find it out. Please let me know if this code helps; you have to combine the parts of the code and assign the resulting code to a keyboard shortcut.

#3

This thread may also be helpful: Reproducible Research "Plugin"

#4

Thanks, for your hints.
In the thread you referred to it is mentioned that it might not be possible to typeset with Folds. I’m wondering what is actually meant by that.

#5

I re-read it. I think I meant the following: say that the output of the fold is a string which represents a sentence, with words separated by blanks. Does TeXmacs treat it like an unbreakable box, or does TeXmacs treats it like all of its other strings of characters? I never tried :slight_smile:

#6

I tried. TeXmacs typesets a string which is output by a Scheme Executable folds; it does not allow, though, to place the executable fold inline, it has to be in a paragraph of its own

#7

Thanks for trying it out and your answer.

Putting the output of executable folds inline would be a helpful feature for report generation (i.e. what is nowadays also called reproducible research).

#8

I did not re-read the thread Reproducible Research “Plugin”. What do you think is missing in the ways to generate a report proposed there?

#9

The use case discussed in http://forum.texmacs.cn/t/reproducible-research-plugin/401 is a good one: a statistical test is performed on a dataset and the result (p-value) should be inserted inline (i.e. within a written paragraph) inside the document.
This is currently not trivial to do in TeXmacs, particularly if you think about special cases like scientific (exponential) notation if a value is very small.

#10

I think the format function from the ice-9 module may help: https://www.gnu.org/software/guile/manual/html_node/Formatted-Output.html

I tested one of the examples in TeXmacs 2.1.4 and it works.

I would compose the format function with one of the functions proposed in Reproducible Research "Plugin". If you are interested and need some help I can try and write a small example.