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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 im
by 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 agoI 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?