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 personal moods. 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 2012) is on the improvement of the user interface and documentation. This comprises the following developments:

• Completion and stabilization of the Qt port and the resulting ports for Windows and MacOS.

• 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.

• 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. Our main next goal is to allows users 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.

• 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.

• Felix Breuer and formerly David Mentré have considered developing a literate programming plug-in for TeXmacs. Another such initiative is Fangle, which has recently been started by Sam Liddicott. 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.