It is difficult to give a precise roadmap for the TeXmacs development, because our plans are permanently adjusted as a function of unexpected needs, help by new contributors and humour. Nevertheless, we tend to spend a significant time on a few major objectives, while amusing ourselves with the implementation of a few new features. Roughly speaking, our roadmap can therefore be divided into three major parts:

1. A limited number of major objectives for the upcoming stable versions (1.1 and 1.2).
2. A certain number of minor objectives, subject to continuous changes, and which progress as a function of available time.
3. Other projects, which are developed by external contributors, but which occasionnaly require changes in the TeXmacs core.

1.Major objectives for the upcoming stable versions

Our main focus for the next stable version 1.1 (to be released during 2007) is on the improvement of the user interface and documentation. This comprises the following developments:

• Increased standardization of the user interface: use M$-style keyboard shortcuts as the default (and provide Emacs compatability as an option), further simplification of the menus and increased use of popup windows.
• Development of a markup-based graphical user interface for popup windows. This new interface might only be ready after the next stable version 1.1.
• Development of user-friendly tools for documentation and translations, which can be used in a collaborative version over the web.
• Completion of a TeXmacs user manual and make it available in book form.

The next stable version 1.1 should also contain a more robust version of the graphical drawing tool, which is developed by Henri Lesourd. Finally, we plan to create an association for the proposition of free scientific software. One of the objectives of this association is to create a simplified system for making donations to TeXmacs and sell our software and documentation.

Within a slightly longer time period of about one or two years, we have also started to reorganize TeXmacs so as to make it a stable development platform for developments. The aim is to reach as quickly as possible a point where the different parts of TeXmacs are well documented and modularized, so that they can easily be further developed in parallel by different people. Most of these deeper developments will reach their maturity only in the after-next stable version 1.2, and comprise the following items:

• Improve the quality of the TeXmacs makefiles so as to make them completely compatible with automake and autoconf.
• Improve the Cygwin port and other ports of TeXmacs and monitor the availability of TeXmacs in major distributions.
• Reshape the low-level window interface so as to make the interface to Xlib easily portable to other systems, such as Gtk, Qt, MacOsX, Windows, etc. Also provide plugins for Cairo, OpenGL, etc.
• Replace the current widget system by a markup-based system, with the possibility to use widgets (from Gtk, Qt, Aqua, etc.) from standard GUI's instead of the TeXmacs-provided style files.
• Separate the style rewriting engine from the typesetter and make both completely lazy.
• Increase the robustness and use of DRDs (Data Relation Definitions), which contain meta-information about TeXmacs or user-provided DTDs.
• Migrate as much as possible of the high-level interface from C++ to Scheme.
• Increase the robustness of TeXmacs and its Scheme APIs by providing detailed exception semantics and tools for debugging.
• Provide extended documentation for developers and intelligent interactive ways to use this documentation.

2.Other things we are working on

Even though our main focus is on the stabilization of TeXmacs and to make it more suitable for developers, we intend to continue some time on the development on new features. A few points currently have our priority:

• Further development of the graphical drawing mode. First, the upcoming support of Cairo, OpenGL, etc. should improve the rendering quality. Secondly, we intend to allow the user to create new macros, either by explicit constructions or constrained-based constructions. Finally, we would like to incorporate several features which are typically found in editors of vector graphics, such as Inkscape.
• Extended features for computer algebra sessions, such as automatic folding of large expressions, lazy output (with subexpressions which can be further evaluated by clicking on them), cas-aided writing, etc.
• Providing more semantics to mathematical formulas by providing a simple way to construct parsers and pretty printers and to use them for establishing a bijection between presentation and content markup for certain well-defined languages.
• Continue the development of remote TeXmacs servers for providing web-based services in combination with TeXmacs. These services comprise chatting (with mathematical formulas) and collaborative authoring.
• Development of universal spreadsheet tools, which can be connected to any external plug-in for doing the computations. In a similar vein, external plug-ins might be used to draw graphs of functions in the graphical mode.

3.Ongoing external developments

Some people which are not part of the core development team use TeXmacs for other projects. We do our best to support such external developments and make the necessary changes inside TeXmacs when necessary. Here follows a list of a few initiatives that we are aware of:

• Lionel Mamane is developing a plug-in for the Coq proof assistant, called Tmegg. A first version of this plug-in is about to be released; please check Lionel's homepage. Similarly, Henri Lesourd is developing an interface to the Omega system. The use of TeXmacs as a front-end for proof assistants and theorem provers raises interesting questions about asynchroneous plug-in evaluations, keeping track and appropriate rendering of the state of a prover, appropriate mathematical and proof markup, etc.
• Saugata Basu, Richard Pollack and Marie-François Roy have written an interactive book “Algorithms in Real Algebraic Geometry” using TeXmacs. Any people interested in developing addional interactive features inside TeXmacs are invited to contact us.
• TeXmacs is used in combination with Maxima in a high-school education project at the Lycée Villegénis at Massy Palaiseau (nearby Paris). In view of this project, we intend to further simplify the user-interface and to make it easier to install up-to-date TeXmacs versions under Windows.
• Felix Breuer and formerly David Mentré have considered developing a literate programming plug-in for TeXmacs. Any concrete implementation of their proposals would happily find its way into the main distribution.

If you want to start a project based on TeXmacs, then please let us know.