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TeXmacs 2.1
- tlamponi 5y ago> GNU TeXmacs is a free scientific editing platform designed to create beautiful technical documents using a wysiwyg interface. -- https://www.texmacs.org/tmweb/home/welcome.en.html https://www.texmacs.org/tmweb/home/welcome.en.html
- soegaard 5y agoWhat are the changes from 2.0 to 2.1 ?
- amichail 5y agoYou can find the changelog here: https://www.texmacs.org/tmweb/about/changes.en.html https://www.texmacs.org/tmweb/about/changes.en.html
- vdhoeven 5y agoSee also https://www.texmacs.org/tmweb/home/news.en.html https://www.texmacs.org/tmweb/home/news.en.html
- GiovanniP 5y agoThe previous version was 1.99.21 :-) 2.1 does not introduce new features with respect to 1.99.21, the software has been gradually refined with new features and bug fixes along the whole 1.99.x series of releases I think (I am following it starting from about 1.99.9). Important features of 2.1 are a much improved LaTeX export filter, improved HTML export, a comment facility (for collaboration), improvements on plugin support for several programming languages (I did not test these extensively), a very nice mechanism for making it easier to use the label/ref mechanism (includes a tiptool for immediately seeing the referenced object).
- chaosite 5y agoAnd although it's called "TeXmacs", it doesn't use TeX, LaTeX, or Emacs, and is not (natively, anyway) compatible with them.
- povik 5y agoAlthough you can use a lot of latex commands to enter math, which is useful when you are starting with texmacs after exposure to latex
- tut-urut-utut 5y agoI know the project exists since forever, and has a brand of its own, but whenever I hear about it, my first thought is "oh, latex package/mode for Emacs. Nice". The name choice is unfortunate, since I'm not the only one with that association.
- vdhoeven 5y agoYes, the name choice is indeed unfortunate and one of my biggest regrets concerning TeXmacs. But it is difficult to change the name now, because that would imply having to redo a lot of documentation, web pages, videos, etc.
- dginev 5y agoYou ought to consider a name charge seriously, at least for the 3.0 version, in my view. It's hard to estimate how much a name impacts adoption, but it is quite likely people would be reluctant to even try a tool which creates associations that they find unappealing. Switching to some phonetically adjacent name, say TypeMax or SciMacs or ... could be a friendly invitation to a new generation of users to give the platform a spin.
- samuel 5y agoHow does it compare to LyX?
- amichail 5y agoUnlike LyX, TeXmacs is truly WYSIWYG and does not use TeX/LaTeX.
- e3bc54b2 5y agoWhich is its greatest strength and greatest weakness :)
- GiovanniP 5y agoThere is always the possibility to switch to source; there is a menu item in the editor (Document->Source->Edit source tree), and when examining source the editor becomes a structure editor (this enforces syntax as far as I understand).
- mgubi 5y agoWell, is more an opportunity to move forward. You just have to consider LaTeX as another output format, not really for human consumption, similar to PDF and HTML. Something you do not want to edit by hand. Many people are anyway moving in this direction using Markdown+pandoc and similar solutions. TeXmacs is another possibility in this direction which allows you to concentrate on the contents, including structure, and not on the programming of the content.
- pjmlp 5y agoAbout a decade ago I was already doing technical documentation like that by using DITA and Oxygen XML Author (there are other alternatives). However most of these Word like tools tend to be commercial (the best ones), so they are hardly seen in FOSS contexts.
- asdf_snar 5y agoYears ago I looked into both LyX and TeXmacs. I could already quickly write math in LaTeX but I wanted to work out calculations on a single screen without the code/renderer split screen setup (having the math directly visible is a game-changer for doing long calculations, by the way). TeXmacs won hands down for me. I had no problem learning the intuitive shortcuts (e.g. any letter - TAB for its Greek counterpart). If you know the LaTeX counterpart you can almost always type that in. The converter to LaTeX source is quite good. I love that the "nesting hierarchy" in a math expression is visible. For instance, "(x^2 + 4)" has four distinct components: the parentheses "(...)", the term "x^2" (two components, "x" and "2"), and the term "4". If you place your cursor before or after the parentheses and use SHIFT+RARROW or SHIFT+LARROW (respectively), you highlight the parentheses; if you do the same before or after the x^2 term, you highlight x^2. I find a lot of math editors (e.g., Word 2016) get this wrong because they will just highlight the parentheses or the exponent. Smart highlighting is super useful for fast manipulation of equations. Oh, and also -- if you are within a set of parentheses, you can keep hitting TAB to cycle through (), [], {}, ... . Not to mention, TeXmacs handles all the \left and \right parentheses sizing for you (the parentheses in the above example would expand if, for instance, you made 4 a fraction like 4/3 -- a quick Meta-f away)
- albertzeyer 5y ago> Converters exist for TeX/LaTeX > it does support (not yet perfect) conversion to and from LaTeX How good is this currently? Is it a good idea to convert back and forth, so that I can collaborate with others who work directly on the Latex sources?
- GiovanniP 5y agoThe export filter allows one to work in my opinion (I used it a bit, I picked up feelings from discussions of others). The import filter is limited (I have read that any LaTeX import filter is limited because of LaTeX's grammar), and in my judgment of this moment (that is, with very limited experience) it may work only if the people you are collaborating with "collaborate", keeping within the set of LaTeX expressions that TeXmacs recognizes. There is work which may be helpful: https://www.texmacs.org/joris/latexconv/latexconv.pdf https://www.texmacs.org/joris/latexconv/latexconv.pdf but I do not know its current status and may not be relevant if people that write LaTeX code use syntax (e.g. a package) that the TeXmacs import filter does not support. By the way, on the topic of using TeXmacs for one's work, I picked from someone the following suggestion: presentations, they usually do not require collaboration.
- baudoly 5y agoI use TeXmacs' conversion capabilities from/to LaTeX on a regular basis. I find that the converter works very well, both ways. When exporting to LaTeX, I have only encountered very few, minor issues, which are easy to fix if you know LaTeX. These glitches are corrected quickly in new versions of TeXmacs. The LaTeX code that TeXmacs produces is nice and readable — certainly much better than typical LaTeX code produced by typical users. The other way around, it all depends on the quality of the source LaTeX file. If you start from standard LaTeX with a reasonably clean style, it works very well. If the source file makes use of very specific commands from very specific packages, then you may have to tweak the result, e.g. re-implement some of the non-standard features. Overall, I think conversion works as well as it could possibly. I am currently importing a 350 pages book into TeXmacs. The conversion works very well, but essentially reveals the flaws in the source files. When sharing a document produced in TeXmacs with LaTeX but non-TeXmacs users, there is also a very nice feature, called conservative conversion: when you first export to a LaTeX file and then import the LaTeX file edited by your colleagues back into TeXmacs, TeXmacs will retain the original TeXmacs file wherever possible (preserving some advanced features that have been lost in translation, such as table management), i.e., TeXmacs will import from LaTeX only at those specific places that have been edited outside of TeXmacs.
- lxpz 5y agoI've successfully used TeXmacs to take more than 100 pages of notes live during a math class. The keyboard shortcuts used to build math formulas are extremely effective and quite easy to learn. I still use it from time to time when I need to write a quick draft of some idea with formulas, or as a wysiwig editor for non-technical text documents. Unfortunately it is not compatible with LaTeX in both directions (export works, import is only partially supported), which means I'm unable to use it when collaborating with other researchers that are used to LaTeX. I'll be happy when LaTeX dies the horrible death it deserves and a better structured document format like TeXmacs emerges as a new consensus, but sadly I don't see that happenning in the forseeable future.
- vdhoeven 5y agoI would like to see what kind of documents cannot be imported from LaTeX, because the LaTeX -> TeXmacs converter works correctly or nearly correctly on thousands of documents from ArXiv. There is also an option for conservative conversions (see Basile's comment below). The way you phrase 'not compatible with LaTeX' and 'partially supported' suggests that TeXmacs is to blame for this situation. IMHO, TeXmacs does the conversions as well as reasonably possible: you could have said 'LaTeX is incompatible with any other format', which I consider a better assessment of the situation. If you don't agree, then please tell me which other document format is compatible with LaTeX.
- bachmeier 5y agoWould be nice if Pandoc supported did TeXmacs conversions in both directions. That would be something of a "security blanket" for many users.
- mgubi 5y agoIn my experience pandoc is not better than TeXmacs in converting LaTeX. The problem, as vdhoeven stressed, is that LaTeX is not a document format which can be converted reliably in something else. Usually I just convert to LaTeX the last version of the document, e.g. before submitting to journal. In this way I always dispose of some alternative storage formats: TeXmacs, PDF, LaTeX and sometimes HTML if needed. The LaTeX produced by TeXmacs uses few packages, which also means that it can be easily maintained.
- sadhen 5y agoI've tuned default font for Korean for GNU TeXmacs 2.1 I wonder if there are any Korean GNU TeXmacs users browsing Hacker News.
- teleforce 5y agoObligatory link for the only book on TeXmacs by its author: [1]https://www.scypress.com/book_info.html https://www.scypress.com/book_info.html
- eggy 5y agoIt uses guile scheme as a scripting language which I like. I think if you are using LaTeX already, going between TeXmacs and LaTeX is not too bad. I have to troubleshoot LaTeX issues within LaTeX all the time when I use special packages and then move to a LaTeX install without those packages. The immediate mode of TeXmacs is good for composing technical documents. I usually fall down a LaTeX hole when I try to get a report done that needs to be done by end of day! TeXmacs is my goto for that, and Pluto notebooks and RMarkdown as well.
- syockit 5y agoTeXmacs is one of those apps that I reinstall from time to time when I want to scribble some math notes and find the split screen setup of most LaTeX editors or Markdown with preview too distracting. It is hands down the most pleasant to use for that purpose. But I still get distracted by this one issue that bugged me since I first tried it 15 years ago: the anti-aliasing quality. The font doesn't look as crisp as what you'd see in other ClearType-enabled applications. Earlier this year, I checkout out the SVN repository to see what's going with the renderer. The default Roman font is not TTF and cannot be rendered by FreeType, so TeXmacs has its own bitmap renderer for TFM fonts. Basically, a glyph is rendered monochrome at a large size and then scaled down to the needed size with 8 color grayscale, IIRC. The bitmap is cached so wherever the glyph of the same style and size is needed, the same thing is drawn. Due to this, the font can sometimes look like it has weird kerning. I tried to at least try subpixel rendering of the glyph bitmap to see if it makes things look better. The subpixel thing worked, but it didn't look any better. In the end, I gave up working on the issue.
- vdhoeven 5y agoI think that this issue was very interesting twenty years ago. With modern high resolution screens, I have to admit that we no longer bother too much... In the future, we might only use Opentype fonts and use a font like TeX Gyre Pagella as our default font. I am afraid that we need to keep the old (tfm+pfb) Computer Modern as a legacy font so that people can reliably continue to use their old TeXmacs documents (remind that minor microtypographic changes may completely change lines and pages are broken).
- mgubi 5y agoI would be interested in improving (or at least experimenting) in this direction. Do you have any hint on what to do, or what was the problem when you tried? As with PDF we are not bound with a specific rendering pathway in the code, there could be the possibility to improve the Qt rendered for, at least, those fonts which are supported via Freetype.
- syockit 5y agoI went back to see what changes I made to my local checkout. It seems I never made as far as to implementing subpixel rendering. I think I experimented with subpixel stuff on some other medium (maybe used GIMP to do the shifting manually, I forgot). So there may still be some hope. On the other hand, regarding the kerning problem, there's not much you can do with the current one bitmap per glyph approach. One idea is to create multiple subpixel offset versions of the glyph. It'll cost more memory though. And the offset version of the bitmap may need to have its leftmost or rightmost column overlap the neighbouring glyph, and I'm not sure if the renderer supports gray level addition or if it would just overwrite the existing column from the previous neighbour. As for Freetype supported fonts, there is an API for enabling subpixel rendering which you can call right before rendering the glyph. I've never experimented with it. By the way, there is already a bug report created for this: https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?45629 https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?45629
- snicker7 5y agoTeXmacs is great (probably best-in-class). However, my biggest gripes with it is how non-portable the TM files are. The only tool that works with these files is texmacs itself. In particular, you can't even convert these files without the full texmacs GUI/runtime. Pity, since I would love to use it as a markup language.
- mgubi 5y agoThe converter (e.g. to HTML or LaTeX) do not require strictly all the program but nobody took the pain to extract it and make it independent of the GUI layer. This could be a nice side project. We are also thinking to implement a facility to use TeXmacs as markdown editor. My personal experience is however that you want to create your content in TeXmacs and then eventually export to other formats, e.g. markdown or HTML to embed in blogs, etc..
- agumonkey 5y agointeresting a *macs that really uses guile :)
- philkrylov 5y agoTeXmacs is great; however, the lack of OpenType gpos/gsub table support, e.g. for combining diacritics, prevents me from using it in production.
- mgubi 5y agoI'm looking right now into better OpenType support. Would you care to specify more in detail what is your use case and the problems you encounter?
- philkrylov 5y agoI would really like to use TeXmacs for preparing linguistic publications, which may include multilingual text. TeXmacs does not seem to support Unicode combining diacritics. E.g. when I paste `бе́ля` in a TexMacs document, the accent is rendered as a full-width character between `е` and `л`, no matter which font I choose. Typing `⌘' e` (Latin `e`, not Cyrillic as above) renders `é`, but it does the job only for precomposed Unicode characters known to TeXmacs. OpenType `gpos` table has (e.g. in Times New Roman) a `mark` feature, specifying a "base" mark-to-base anchor point on Cyrillic vowels and a "mark" mark-to-base anchor point on U+0301 (combining acute accent), so the renderer can position the mark correctly above the preceding character. However, TeXmacs reimplements most of font rendering instead of reusing Harfbuzz which implements countless script-specific shaping quirks using OpenType tables. IMHO it's a Sisyphus' job.
- mgubi 5y agoThanks for the detailed description. I understand better the problem. I'm not very accustomed to other scripts so I would need to look into this with more details. But at least now I understand what HarfBuzz is about :)