5 ms·

Texture – As open as LaTeX and as simple as a classic word processor

112 points by _mql 10y ago

hprotagonist 10y ago
For all the scientific writing I do (ie, 99% of my output that isn't blather on the internet), i use LaTeX or markdown. LaTeX primarily for peer-reviewed work, markdown for notes, informal documentation, and whitepapers. In both cases, i can use a powerful text editor (sublime or atom or emacs) with very rich and highly developed cross-platform support. What are some compelling reasons to use this tool instead?
- capnrefsmmat 10y ago
  The scientific publishing workflow is insane, and this tool seems like it could help. In the biomedical sciences (or any field that ends up on PubMed), articles have to be converted to JATS XML (http://jats.nlm.nih.gov/ http://jats.nlm.nih.gov/), a standard XML dialect for journal articles. It builds in citation metadata, cross-referencing, figure references, etc., and is supposed to be a stable archival format for long-term storage of articles. Individual publishers (PLOS, BMC, etc.) build their entire publication workflows around JATS, so articles can be typeset into PDF or rendered to HTML, or delivered to e-reader apps or whatever. Since it's semantic XML, you can do bibliography mining, automatic reference following, extraction of figures, or whatever you might want to make reading or text-mining easier. But articles are often written in Word, so there's a tremendous amount of work going into manually or semi-manually converting every manuscript to semantic XML from the Word soup it arrives as. Same goes for LaTeX: a few journals just publish LaTeXed PDFs directly, but big publishers like Elsevier and Springer have semi-automated processes for converting LaTeX to in-house formats so they can provide HTML versions of pages. So, short version: an editor supporting JATS XML can support all the features you need in a scientific document, and can dramatically simplify the publication workflow and hopefully save a bunch of money. And hopefully open-access journals pass that savings on to users. For users, it could mean better e-reading apps (so you don't have to zoom in on tiny fonts in a PDF on your iPad), better support for cross-referencing and figures than Word has, automated formatting (journals style the XML, so you don't have to do margin and layout crap), and a simpler submission process.
  - hprotagonist 10y ago
    Interesting. This seems like a tool for journal staff and editors, then, rather than practicing scientists.
    - dflock 10y ago
      It's a tool for everyone in the writing-editing-publishing pipeline. They could all use the same tool, working on the same document & document format, throughout the process. This will remove a huge amount of reformatting/conversion work between steps in the pipeline.
      - hprotagonist 10y ago
        The rebuttal, guaranteed to come from anyone with tenure but also from distinctly untenured folks like myself is this: "I have all my manuscripts and biosketches and workflow in LaTex/Word. All my references are in mendeley/zotero/endnote/bibtex files i've hand-massaged. Until such time as my home journal requires me to use this format i've never heard about, and gives me the tools to convert everything I've built over the last 2-20 years, I am not interested in it unless you've got something more compelling than what you've shown me so far." getting traction is going to be _very hard_.
        dflock 10y ago
        Of course - that's the most obvious thing in the world. Getting traction against an entrenched workflow component - a people problem - is, almost universally, very very hard. The technical problem - writing your new tool - is trivial by comparison. But they do seem to be coming at this from the journal/pull end of the workflow, which is a very good place to start.
  - jessriedel 10y ago
    This is a very insightful comment.
  - dmd 10y ago
- Someone 10y ago
  When I downloaded and unzipped this, I got a folder with what looked like a web site. I figured I would need to run it under a web server, but double-clicked the ‘index.html’ file anyways. That opened a simple page with 3 links to example files, and clicking either opened a working document editor, where ‘working’ seems to include the saving of changes (somewhere in browser history; edits survive closing the web page, but get lost on clearing history). (Tested on Safari, Chrome, and FireFox on Mac OS X Sierra) I guess that means this aims to be a powerful document editor with rich and highly developed cross-platform support. It’s not as flexible as LaTeX or markdown, but that is on purpose.
  - hprotagonist 10y ago
    by rich and highly developed, i mean things like "having a package manager that hooks me into mendeley, zotero, and github, has an integrated linter, supports build and live-preview, and lets me run custom macros with whatever keybindings i prefer". "runs everywhere because it's in javascript" doesn't necessarily get me any of that-- the editing functionalities in this tool seem rudimentary so far.
    - Someone 10y ago
      For the hooks and key bindings: it is an alpha release of the initial version. Those things may come, and will come if it becomes successful and users want it. Certainly, it has to provide a way to really store documents. The cloud then is a natural choice for this kind of tool. Also, I think this doesn't need a linter, as the UI limits you to creating valid documents, and it has live preview because it is wysiwig (it isn't TeX and doesn't aim to be) I would guess (but it is not my project) macros are unlikely to come soon, if at all.
- duerrp 10y ago
  As a side note, if you are already in emacs, you could write your articles in org-mode instead of LaTex. It's gotten to a point where I am starting to see Latex exclusively as a language to compile to, not something you want to write yourself. If you haven't used a well-configured org-mode, have a look at this demo for example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2t925KRBbFc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2t925KRBbFc. There's nothing out there (open source or proprietary) that comes close for scientific work in my opinion.
  - huac 10y ago
    I've started writing everything in R Markdown and (very easily) converting to PDF or tex, which is just blissful.
  - p4bl0 10y ago
    Really impressive demo. Thanks for sharing.
dtparr 10y ago
Interesting phrasing under the license section: >Texture is open source, and you are legally free to use it commercially. If you are using Texture to make profit, we expect that you help fund its development and maintenance. My first read through, I thought it was making a free as in beer/speech distinction for commercial use, but looking at the actual license on github, that doesn't appear to be the case. I think the second sentence is perhaps more often worded as 'ask' or 'hope' vs. 'expect' which I initially took as more of a contractual expectation (i.e. a requirement).
- pbhjpbhj 10y ago
  Re your last para I think "expect" is the better choice. "If you use our stuff to do your day job then we expect you to help with our finances" - they're not forcing you to but they are applying social pressure. "Expect" isn't a contract-like term IMO as it's too vague. If you were demanding it then they'd offer a difference license; this is not [as it's written] instantiating a contractual obligation, it's calling on the users moral nature.
- frik 10y ago
  https://github.com/substance/texture/blob/develop/LICENSE.md https://github.com/substance/texture/blob/develop/LICENSE.md I wonder why they don't use a variant of the BSD/MIT or GPL?
  - rwmj 10y ago
    This is the MIT license (compare: https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT)
matt4077 10y ago
Not sure if I'm expecting too much, but the html in the editor is quite terrible – <span>s used for everything, including headlines, <br> to separate paragraphs etc. HTML5 has dramatically increased the potential for semantic html and I wish more people would make use of it.
- int_19h 10y ago
  If I understand correctly, the HTML is not actually published. So there are no benefits to having a better semantic structure to it - think of it as a rendering target for the sole purpose of making it look nice on the screen.
ams6110 10y ago
Might want to do somthing about that 1MB screenshot rendered as a 770x570 image.
- speps 10y ago
  Also, the name, I would have taken this tool as related to textures... not text.
suxen9 10y ago
Sure...got it working but how do enter math? You know, $x^2$ or integrals or fractions?
lobster_johnson 10y ago
This is apparently powered by Substance, a JS library that implements a WYSIWYG editor, and which looks interesting. I wonder how it stacks up against the other leading JS-based editors such as ProseMirror, Quill and Draft, which are all quite solid at this point. (Unfortunately, some rudimentary testing shows that Texture is buggy to the point of being unusable — a lot buggier than I expect for a beta. For example, ctrl-Z to undo doesn't work in Safari and works awkwardly in Chrome; pasting doesn't preserve any formatting or semantic attributes; I can't seem to be able to modify (or even insert) any images; and it's pretty much completely non-functional on iOS.)
robochat 10y ago
Latex itself is still progressing, they've incorporated lua into Tex so that they can add new features. There are also alternatives to Latex such as ConText although I've never heard of anyone actually using it. But in general it's hard to know what's really going on without doing a lot of research. I also once read about another alternative to Latex called Lout but it never seemed to go anywhere. I just use Lyx now to write my articles. I've actually pretty much forgotten the Latex that I used to know.
- johntaitorg 10y ago
  Yeah, LyX is excellent if you understand LaTeX but don't use it often enough to memorize it.
_mql 10y ago
Thank you very much for your comments! A few notes from the authors: Texture's first goal is its use at publishers, during their review and QC processes. Word or InDesign submissions are converted to JATS using the converter from Open Journal Systems (OJS) and from then on are treated with Texture until publication. Once journals have adopted JATS in their editing workflow, I'm sure they are willing to switch allowing submissions in JATS. Then authors have an incentive to write their papers in Texture from the beginning. Texture is hackable and can be extended via packages implemented in JS (think Github Atom editor). Each JATS node type is implemented as a package already, with still many of them missing (math, figgroups, ...). A package implementation looks like this: https://github.com/substance/texture/tree/develop/lib/tagging https://github.com/substance/texture/tree/develop/lib/taggin... We understand that publishers have different needs and allow them to configure and customize the editor to any degree. We also want to open up the editor to community contributions, e.g. one could implement an R-backed visualization content type (see https://stenci.la/ https://stenci.la/), that could live right in the editor. This would require introducing custom tags in the JATS serialization format, which we think is valid, if you are aware of the implications. Texture is at an Alpha state, but a number of organisations committed to funding it's development, so we should see stable versions in the coming months. You are invited to join the Substance Consortium, which drives the development of Texture. http://substance.io/consortium/ http://substance.io/consortium/ See the current product brief, until we have published a public roadmap. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1v01mfeJw0IHgN7EIKE6JtEkECxXkRWi6eq3cesoRzY4/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/document/d/1v01mfeJw0IHgN7EIKE6JtEkE...

112 points by _mql 10y ago

For all the scientific writing I do (ie, 99% of my output that isn't blather on the internet), i use LaTeX or markdown. LaTeX primarily for peer-reviewed work, markdown for notes, informal documentation, and whitepapers. In both cases, i can use a powerful text editor (sublime or atom or emacs) with very rich and highly developed cross-platform support. What are some compelling reasons to use this tool instead?

capnrefsmmat 10y ago
The scientific publishing workflow is insane, and this tool seems like it could help. In the biomedical sciences (or any field that ends up on PubMed), articles have to be converted to JATS XML (http://jats.nlm.nih.gov/ http://jats.nlm.nih.gov/), a standard XML dialect for journal articles. It builds in citation metadata, cross-referencing, figure references, etc., and is supposed to be a stable archival format for long-term storage of articles. Individual publishers (PLOS, BMC, etc.) build their entire publication workflows around JATS, so articles can be typeset into PDF or rendered to HTML, or delivered to e-reader apps or whatever. Since it's semantic XML, you can do bibliography mining, automatic reference following, extraction of figures, or whatever you might want to make reading or text-mining easier. But articles are often written in Word, so there's a tremendous amount of work going into manually or semi-manually converting every manuscript to semantic XML from the Word soup it arrives as. Same goes for LaTeX: a few journals just publish LaTeXed PDFs directly, but big publishers like Elsevier and Springer have semi-automated processes for converting LaTeX to in-house formats so they can provide HTML versions of pages. So, short version: an editor supporting JATS XML can support all the features you need in a scientific document, and can dramatically simplify the publication workflow and hopefully save a bunch of money. And hopefully open-access journals pass that savings on to users. For users, it could mean better e-reading apps (so you don't have to zoom in on tiny fonts in a PDF on your iPad), better support for cross-referencing and figures than Word has, automated formatting (journals style the XML, so you don't have to do margin and layout crap), and a simpler submission process.
- hprotagonist 10y ago
  Interesting. This seems like a tool for journal staff and editors, then, rather than practicing scientists.
  - dflock 10y ago
    It's a tool for everyone in the writing-editing-publishing pipeline. They could all use the same tool, working on the same document & document format, throughout the process. This will remove a huge amount of reformatting/conversion work between steps in the pipeline.
    - hprotagonist 10y ago
      The rebuttal, guaranteed to come from anyone with tenure but also from distinctly untenured folks like myself is this: "I have all my manuscripts and biosketches and workflow in LaTex/Word. All my references are in mendeley/zotero/endnote/bibtex files i've hand-massaged. Until such time as my home journal requires me to use this format i've never heard about, and gives me the tools to convert everything I've built over the last 2-20 years, I am not interested in it unless you've got something more compelling than what you've shown me so far." getting traction is going to be _very hard_.
      - dflock 10y ago
        Of course - that's the most obvious thing in the world. Getting traction against an entrenched workflow component - a people problem - is, almost universally, very very hard. The technical problem - writing your new tool - is trivial by comparison. But they do seem to be coming at this from the journal/pull end of the workflow, which is a very good place to start.
- jessriedel 10y ago
  This is a very insightful comment.
- dmd 10y ago
Someone 10y ago
When I downloaded and unzipped this, I got a folder with what looked like a web site. I figured I would need to run it under a web server, but double-clicked the ‘index.html’ file anyways. That opened a simple page with 3 links to example files, and clicking either opened a working document editor, where ‘working’ seems to include the saving of changes (somewhere in browser history; edits survive closing the web page, but get lost on clearing history). (Tested on Safari, Chrome, and FireFox on Mac OS X Sierra) I guess that means this aims to be a powerful document editor with rich and highly developed cross-platform support. It’s not as flexible as LaTeX or markdown, but that is on purpose.
- hprotagonist 10y ago
  by rich and highly developed, i mean things like "having a package manager that hooks me into mendeley, zotero, and github, has an integrated linter, supports build and live-preview, and lets me run custom macros with whatever keybindings i prefer". "runs everywhere because it's in javascript" doesn't necessarily get me any of that-- the editing functionalities in this tool seem rudimentary so far.
  - Someone 10y ago
    For the hooks and key bindings: it is an alpha release of the initial version. Those things may come, and will come if it becomes successful and users want it. Certainly, it has to provide a way to really store documents. The cloud then is a natural choice for this kind of tool. Also, I think this doesn't need a linter, as the UI limits you to creating valid documents, and it has live preview because it is wysiwig (it isn't TeX and doesn't aim to be) I would guess (but it is not my project) macros are unlikely to come soon, if at all.
duerrp 10y ago
As a side note, if you are already in emacs, you could write your articles in org-mode instead of LaTex. It's gotten to a point where I am starting to see Latex exclusively as a language to compile to, not something you want to write yourself. If you haven't used a well-configured org-mode, have a look at this demo for example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2t925KRBbFc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2t925KRBbFc. There's nothing out there (open source or proprietary) that comes close for scientific work in my opinion.
- huac 10y ago
  I've started writing everything in R Markdown and (very easily) converting to PDF or tex, which is just blissful.
- p4bl0 10y ago
  Really impressive demo. Thanks for sharing.

dtparr 10y ago

Interesting phrasing under the license section: >Texture is open source, and you are legally free to use it commercially. If you are using Texture to make profit, we expect that you help fund its development and maintenance. My first read through, I thought it was making a free as in beer/speech distinction for commercial use, but looking at the actual license on github, that doesn't appear to be the case. I think the second sentence is perhaps more often worded as 'ask' or 'hope' vs. 'expect' which I initially took as more of a contractual expectation (i.e. a requirement).

pbhjpbhj 10y ago
Re your last para I think "expect" is the better choice. "If you use our stuff to do your day job then we expect you to help with our finances" - they're not forcing you to but they are applying social pressure. "Expect" isn't a contract-like term IMO as it's too vague. If you were demanding it then they'd offer a difference license; this is not [as it's written] instantiating a contractual obligation, it's calling on the users moral nature.
frik 10y ago
https://github.com/substance/texture/blob/develop/LICENSE.md https://github.com/substance/texture/blob/develop/LICENSE.md I wonder why they don't use a variant of the BSD/MIT or GPL?
- rwmj 10y ago
  This is the MIT license (compare: https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT)

matt4077 10y ago

Not sure if I'm expecting too much, but the html in the editor is quite terrible – <span>s used for everything, including headlines, <br> to separate paragraphs etc. HTML5 has dramatically increased the potential for semantic html and I wish more people would make use of it.

int_19h 10y ago
If I understand correctly, the HTML is not actually published. So there are no benefits to having a better semantic structure to it - think of it as a rendering target for the sole purpose of making it look nice on the screen.

ams6110 10y ago

Might want to do somthing about that 1MB screenshot rendered as a 770x570 image.

speps 10y ago
Also, the name, I would have taken this tool as related to textures... not text.

suxen9 10y ago

Sure...got it working but how do enter math? You know, $x^2$ or integrals or fractions?

lobster_johnson 10y ago

This is apparently powered by Substance, a JS library that implements a WYSIWYG editor, and which looks interesting. I wonder how it stacks up against the other leading JS-based editors such as ProseMirror, Quill and Draft, which are all quite solid at this point. (Unfortunately, some rudimentary testing shows that Texture is buggy to the point of being unusable — a lot buggier than I expect for a beta. For example, ctrl-Z to undo doesn't work in Safari and works awkwardly in Chrome; pasting doesn't preserve any formatting or semantic attributes; I can't seem to be able to modify (or even insert) any images; and it's pretty much completely non-functional on iOS.)

robochat 10y ago

Latex itself is still progressing, they've incorporated lua into Tex so that they can add new features. There are also alternatives to Latex such as ConText although I've never heard of anyone actually using it. But in general it's hard to know what's really going on without doing a lot of research. I also once read about another alternative to Latex called Lout but it never seemed to go anywhere. I just use Lyx now to write my articles. I've actually pretty much forgotten the Latex that I used to know.

johntaitorg 10y ago
Yeah, LyX is excellent if you understand LaTeX but don't use it often enough to memorize it.

_mql 10y ago

Thank you very much for your comments! A few notes from the authors: Texture's first goal is its use at publishers, during their review and QC processes. Word or InDesign submissions are converted to JATS using the converter from Open Journal Systems (OJS) and from then on are treated with Texture until publication. Once journals have adopted JATS in their editing workflow, I'm sure they are willing to switch allowing submissions in JATS. Then authors have an incentive to write their papers in Texture from the beginning. Texture is hackable and can be extended via packages implemented in JS (think Github Atom editor). Each JATS node type is implemented as a package already, with still many of them missing (math, figgroups, ...). A package implementation looks like this: https://github.com/substance/texture/tree/develop/lib/tagging https://github.com/substance/texture/tree/develop/lib/taggin... We understand that publishers have different needs and allow them to configure and customize the editor to any degree. We also want to open up the editor to community contributions, e.g. one could implement an R-backed visualization content type (see https://stenci.la/ https://stenci.la/), that could live right in the editor. This would require introducing custom tags in the JATS serialization format, which we think is valid, if you are aware of the implications. Texture is at an Alpha state, but a number of organisations committed to funding it's development, so we should see stable versions in the coming months. You are invited to join the Substance Consortium, which drives the development of Texture. http://substance.io/consortium/ http://substance.io/consortium/ See the current product brief, until we have published a public roadmap. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1v01mfeJw0IHgN7EIKE6JtEkECxXkRWi6eq3cesoRzY4/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/document/d/1v01mfeJw0IHgN7EIKE6JtEkE...