Getting started

1.Conventions for this manual

Throughout the TeXmacs manual, menu entries will be typeset using a sans serif font, like in Document, File→Load or Text→Font shape→Italic. Keyboard input will be typeset in a typewriter font inside boxes, like in C-s. At the righthand side of menu entries, you see keystroke equivalents, when these are available. The following abbreviations are used for such keystrokes:

S-

For shift key combinations.

C-

For control key combinations.

A-

For alternate key combinations.

M-

For meta key combinations.

H-

For hyper key combinations.

For instance, A-C-b stands for alternate-control-b. Spaces inside keyboard shortcuts indicate multiple key-presses. For instance, M-t N b stands for meta-t N b.

The alternate, meta and hyper keys are not available on all keyboards. On recent PC's, the meta key is often replaced by the windows key. In the case when one or several modifier keys are missing on your keyboard, you may use escape instead of M-, escape escape instead of A- and F5, escape escape escape or A-C- instead of H-. For instance, escape w is equivalent to A-w. You may also configure the keyboard modifiers in order to take full advantage out of the powerful set of keyboard shortcuts which is provided by TeXmacs.

Notice that the TeXmacs menus and keyboard behavior are contextual, i.e. they depend on the current mode (i.e. text mode or “math mode”), the current language and the position of the cursor inside your document. For instance, inside math mode, you have special keyboard shortcuts which are handy for typing mathematical formulas, but which are useless in text mode.

2.Configuring TeXmacs

When starting TeXmacs for the first time, the program automatically configures itself in a way which it thinks to be most suitable for you. For instance, TeXmacs will attempt to determine your systems settings for the language and the paper type of your printer. However, the automatic configuration may sometimes fail or you may want to use an alternative configuration. In that case, you should go to the Edit→Preferences menu and specify your preferences.

In particular, we recommend you to configure the desired “look and feel” of TeXmacs. By default, we use the Emacs look and feel, which ensures a limited compatibility of the TeXmacs keyboard shortcuts with those of Emacs. Also, TeXmacs comes with a powerful keyboard shortcut system, which attempts to optimize the use of the modifier keys like shift and control on your keyboard. However, on many X Window systems these modifier keys are not well configured, so that you may wish to redo this yourself. More details can be found in the section about the configuration of TeXmacs.

3.Creating, saving and loading documents

When launching TeXmacs without any command line options, the editor automatically creates a new document for you. You may also create a new document yourself using File→New. Newly created documents do not yet carry a name. In order to give them a name, you should click on File→Save as.

We recommend you to give documents a name immediately after their creation; this will avoid you to loose documents. It is also recommended to specify the global settings for your document when necessary. First of all, you may specify a document style like article, book or seminar using Document→Style. If you write documents in several languages, then you may want to specify the language of your document using Document→Language. Similarly, you may specify a paper type using Document→Page→Size.

After modifying your document, you may save it using File→Save. Old documents can be retrieved using File→Load. Notice that you can edit several documents in the same window using TeXmacs; you can switch between different buffers using Go.

4.Printing documents

You can print the current file using File→Print→Print all. By default, TeXmacs assumes that you have a 600dpi printer for a4 paper. These default settings can be changed in Edit→Preferences→Printer. You can also print to a postscript file using File→Print→Print all to file (in which case the default printer settings are used for creating the output) or File→Export→Postscript (in which case the printer settings are ignored).

You may export to PDF using File→Export→Pdf. Notice that you should set Edit→Preferences→Printer→Font type→Type 1 if you want the produced Postscript or PDF file to use Type 1 fonts. However, only the CM fonts admit Type 1 versions. These CM fonts are of a slightly inferior quality to the EC fonts, mainly for accented characters. Consequently, you might prefer to use the EC fonts as long as you do not need a PDF file which looks nice in Acrobat Reader.

When adequately configuring TeXmacs, the editor is guaranteed to be wysiwyg: the result after printing out is exactly what you see on your screen. In order to obtain full wysiwygness, you should in particular select Document→Page→Type→Paper and Document→Page→Screen layout→Margins as on paper. You should also make sure that the characters on your screen use the same number of dots per inch as your printer. This rendering precision of the characters may be changed using Document→Font→Dpi. Currently, minor typesetting changes may occur when changing the dpi, which may globally affect the document through line and page breaking. In a future release this drawback should be removed.