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It is not my intention to sound aggressive, but just to get things straight. I understand from the original comment that the author likes to use TeXmacs, but t

It is not my intention to sound aggressive, but just to get things straight. I understand from the original comment that the author likes to use TeXmacs, but that (s)he thinks that the proclaimed incompatibility with LaTeX is too big a drawback for more than occasional use. Now one has to be fair when making this kind of statements. First of all: how 'big' is this incompatibility? I think that it is not that big at all and roughly as big as when you use a new style package with LaTeX or when trying to recompile a 25 year old LaTeX file. Secondly: who is to blame for this incompatibility? TeX/LaTeX was designed to have a Turing complete grammar, which makes it impossible to write 100% reliable converters. The way the comment is stated, it suggests that TeXmacs is not good enough. I think that this is a misrepresentation. Now it is plausable that the author is not even aware of the implicit bias of the terms 'incompatible with LaTeX' and 'partial converter'. Therefore, my reply might sound aggressive. But if you carefully reread it, then you will understand that it isn't.

Koshkin 5y ago
I just came here to say thank you for this marvelous piece of software - one of the very best in the free software world, in my opinion.
lxpz 5y ago
Hey, thanks for sharing your perspective. I'm sorry you interpreted my comment in that way, I did not mean to say that TeXmacs had shortcomings in the way it imports LaTeX, in fact I do believe it does its best given the constraints it faces, but as you justly said the task is impossible in the general case given LaTeX's Turing completeness. To be clear the problem is not TeXmacs, but the fact that in a team most people work in LaTeX and having to constantly convert from one another would be impractical. In particular I rely heavily on git to manage document history and to view diffs from my co-authors, and having to manage a document that exists in two languages simultaneously would add significant complexity to a workflow that I'm already barely able to make my co-authors follow. This would be of course significantly simplificated if import followed by export (and the reverse) was the identity function, which would technically allow TeXmacs to directly edit LaTeX documents without having to rewrite them entirely, but I don't believe that to be the case and again I don't see how it could be possible. To answer your other comment, this paper of mine https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.04063 https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.04063 has many problems when importing in TeXmacs: the title is not aligned correctly, the algorithms are messed up, the figures don't have the correct sizes, and one of the figures which is exported from Inkscape is not even imported at all. There are also a bunch of macros that are shown as raw visible commands in TeXmacs and I don't know what to do with those (but that's certainly something I could learn to manage). Again not blaming you or the particular TeXmacs devs working on import, this situation is a fatality of how LaTeX works.
- GiovanniP 5y ago
  I got curious, downloaded the source, compiled with LaTeX and, separately, imported the source file in TeXmacs. Perhaps there are a few points in which TeXmacs' import can be improved immediately (other things seem a bit more complex). I wrote a post at http://forum.texmacs.cn/t/latex-import-hacker-news-example/495 http://forum.texmacs.cn/t/latex-import-hacker-news-example/4... One thing that makes a small part of the import not work is that in the LaTeX source some of the macros are defined after the start of the document, and TeXmacs sees them too late to take them into account when formatting the title. Said this, TeXmacs finds the references, and LaTeX does not (I do not find the bibliography file, which is named "bibliography") ... how is this possible?

Koshkin 5y ago

I just came here to say thank you for this marvelous piece of software - one of the very best in the free software world, in my opinion.

lxpz 5y ago

Hey, thanks for sharing your perspective. I'm sorry you interpreted my comment in that way, I did not mean to say that TeXmacs had shortcomings in the way it imports LaTeX, in fact I do believe it does its best given the constraints it faces, but as you justly said the task is impossible in the general case given LaTeX's Turing completeness. To be clear the problem is not TeXmacs, but the fact that in a team most people work in LaTeX and having to constantly convert from one another would be impractical. In particular I rely heavily on git to manage document history and to view diffs from my co-authors, and having to manage a document that exists in two languages simultaneously would add significant complexity to a workflow that I'm already barely able to make my co-authors follow. This would be of course significantly simplificated if import followed by export (and the reverse) was the identity function, which would technically allow TeXmacs to directly edit LaTeX documents without having to rewrite them entirely, but I don't believe that to be the case and again I don't see how it could be possible. To answer your other comment, this paper of mine https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.04063 https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.04063 has many problems when importing in TeXmacs: the title is not aligned correctly, the algorithms are messed up, the figures don't have the correct sizes, and one of the figures which is exported from Inkscape is not even imported at all. There are also a bunch of macros that are shown as raw visible commands in TeXmacs and I don't know what to do with those (but that's certainly something I could learn to manage). Again not blaming you or the particular TeXmacs devs working on import, this situation is a fatality of how LaTeX works.

GiovanniP 5y ago
I got curious, downloaded the source, compiled with LaTeX and, separately, imported the source file in TeXmacs. Perhaps there are a few points in which TeXmacs' import can be improved immediately (other things seem a bit more complex). I wrote a post at http://forum.texmacs.cn/t/latex-import-hacker-news-example/495 http://forum.texmacs.cn/t/latex-import-hacker-news-example/4... One thing that makes a small part of the import not work is that in the LaTeX source some of the macros are defined after the start of the document, and TeXmacs sees them too late to take them into account when formatting the title. Said this, TeXmacs finds the references, and LaTeX does not (I do not find the bibliography file, which is named "bibliography") ... how is this possible?