4 ms·

TeXmacs “The Jolly Writer” book is now available as pdf download

111 points by amichail 4y ago

amichail 4y ago
This book was written by the main author of TeXmacs and previously only available in hard cover format. BTW, you can also make a donation from the download page.
- Koshkin 4y ago
  Thanks, just did. TeXmacs is one of the best examples of high quality free software.
spacewizard 4y ago
TeXmacs has been an excellent tool that has allowed me to quickly write numerous beautiful documents in the style of TeX during my PhD without all the struggle of TeX itself. I'd highly recommend anyone who regularly writes/types technical documents to give this a go. There is a small learning curve, but with the Jolly Writer now being freely available, I think the learning curve is significantly diminished. On top of this, there is a bustling community of users on http://forum.texmacs.cn http://forum.texmacs.cn who support one another when problems arise.
- chungy 4y ago
  It has some severe limitations if you really want to exploit what TeX allows you to do with layouting. That being said, most documents don't need to (ab)use TeX to that extent. TeXmacs is fine for probably over 99% of actual documents.
  - spacewizard 4y ago
    Yes, of course it is not perfect and has limitations, but as you say, for the majority of purposes, I find it is a much easier tool to use. I've mostly used TeXmacs to quickly draft documents without having to deal with setting up a TeX environment. Once I am happy with my drafts, I write these up in LaTeX. Hopefully, in time TeXmacs will be more universally accepted that a post-writeup in LaTeX will not be necessary.
    - lr1970 4y ago
      > Once I am happy with my drafts, I write these up in LaTeX. If I am not mistken, TeXmacs can export into LaTeX directly.
  - mgubi 4y ago
    I'm not sure which kind of limitations you are referring to. In my experience the only kind of things I cannot replicate with TeXmacs are variable width paragraphs to follows an arbitrary shape around an image. TeXmacs can do multi-column paragraphs, and complex layouts like this one: https://github.com/texmacs/tm-forge/tree/main/examples/resume-template https://github.com/texmacs/tm-forge/tree/main/examples/resum... or this one https://github.com/texmacs/tm-forge/blob/main/examples/exercises-template/exercises-template.png https://github.com/texmacs/tm-forge/blob/main/examples/exerc... or rich presentations like this one https://github.com/texmacs/tm-forge/blob/main/examples/lecture-slides-audoly/amphi08_tm.pdf https://github.com/texmacs/tm-forge/blob/main/examples/lectu... One should bear in mind that TeX by itself is a Turing-complete typesetting language while TeXmacs format is a format that is it restrict the range of documents one can express in order to be able to transform them more reliably, e.g. by conversion to HTML or PDF or even LaTeX. So certainly there are many more things you can to with TeX (but not with LaTeX itself) than with TeXmacs but this is a feature, not a bug :) (very much like the fact that you can do many more things with PS than with PDF, and that is why the first is a language while the second is a format).
    - GiovanniP 4y ago
      > So certainly there are many more things you can to with TeX (but not with LaTeX itself) than with TeXmacs Although TeXmacs plus its Scheme extension language is much more powerful than TeXmacs alone.
random314 4y ago
I wonder what texmacs template he used to author the book, it looks great.
- spacewizard 4y ago
  It does indeed, there are many options to choose from when you start up TeXmacs. From what I can tell, it seems to be a variation of `tmmanual` which can be found under: Focus>Styles>Documentation>TeXmacs>tmmanual. Hope this helps.
billyjobob 4y ago
All this time I assumed that GNU TeXmacs was was a GNU Emacs mode for editing TeX. Turns out it isn’t related to either Emacs or TeX. If only they hadn’t chosen such a doubly misleading name I might have been using this for the past 20 years.
- mgubi 4y ago
  It has been an unfortunate decision. Once in a while the community discuss to change the name, but no convincing proposal have emerged. On the other hand I really hear very few people complaining about JavaScript. So I guess, the name is not all here.
sho_hn 4y ago
TeX/LaTeX is so addictive to use ... It's such a quirky and messy ecosystem. So organically grown over decades. Doing any complex layout is a struggle of trial and error and searching for advise, there's so many ways to do the same thing, you end up combining two dozens sometimes subtly incompatible packages, you end up gardening your own templates over time with meticulously embedded commentary to keep the complexity at bay, you struggle to understand what's going on under the hood to reason about what's happening, you dive into source files, etc. But the thing is ... at the end of all that labor, it all works and the quality of the output is simply second to none. Making a beautiful doc with it makes you feel like a master carving a famous statue out of marble. Ultimately it feels like it couldn't have been done any other way, and you do love the end result dearly. I do keep half an eye on https://sile-typesetter.org/ https://sile-typesetter.org/ to see if it may become sort of a consolidated "LaTeX: The Good Parts" over time, replacing the cruft with a new baseline, but in the meantime I will keep treasuring my little zoo of .tex files.
- amichail 4y ago
  TeXmacs isn't based on TeX but nonetheless produces documents of similar quality.
  - sho_hn 4y ago
    So I did already know that TeXmacs is not a LaTeX frontend (LaTeX being a set of TeX macros concerned with content organization, e.g. it's what gives you complex notions of things like "chapter" and "section" that you don't get from tex-core or tex-plain), but rather a WYSIWYG/M editor similar to LyX (LyX uses LaTeX under the hood). But I thought it does use the TeX engine under the hood for typesetting? I figured it's a WYSIWYG frontend that maps some sort of internal representation to a TeX output and throws it at TeX in the end, with its own LaTeX-type ideas for higher organization?
    - amichail 4y ago
      It uses its own real-time typesetter specifically designed for WYSIWYG editing. The typesetter is not TeX but is inspired by it.
spacewizard 4y ago
As an aside, a fork of TeXmacs has recently gained a lot of ground, called Mogan (https://mogan.app https://mogan.app) which is being developed alongside TeXmacs. Very usefully, they provide a means to test out TeXmacs/Mogan via your browser directly: https://mogan.app/wasm/Mogan.html https://mogan.app/wasm/Mogan.html I would enourage anyone interested to give this a go.
- spacewizard 4y ago
  Further, a demonstration of TeXmacs can be seen in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H46ON2FB30U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H46ON2FB30U
gsinclair 4y ago
This is great news. TeXmacs looks like a great project. Even though I don’t use it, I really appreciate there being options in the typesetting space, and dearly wish there were more. I wish they’d change the name, though — I ignored the project for a long long long time because of my reasonable presuppositions about it. JollyWriter is a very good replacement name, IMO.
mustardants199 4y ago
While the process of using TeX/LaTeX can be complex and require trial and error, combining multiple packages and customizing templates, the end result is high quality documents that feel like they could not have been produced any other way, and ultimately bring a sense of satisfaction and accomplishment to the user.
- mgubi 4y ago
  It is not clear what this comment would like to add. The presupposition that no other software can equal or surpass some magic powers of TeX/LaTeX has nothing to do with technical merit. Indeed I guess most users cannot distinguish a document produced with TeXmacs or with LaTeX. For example all these papers: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2212.05584.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2212.05584.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2112.05562.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2112.05562.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2210.15047.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2210.15047.pdf have been typesetted directly with TeXmacs with no intervention of LaTeX whatsoever. What use cases do you have in mind to support your claim? ps: it is clear that TeX is a complete typesetting language, but not a format. So TeXmacs need to be compared with some restricted set of LaTeX packages. The goals for the program is to deliver the user from the burden to be an expert to be able to compose beautiful and rich technical documents. But I would disagree that the ultimate goal of a system like TeX/LaTeX is to satisfy the 0.01% of hackers which enjoy spending their times coding in an obscure macro language (which is fun, I know, like composing documents directly writing PostScript programs). TeX was made to make possible beautiful typesetting and TeXmacs carry on this vision and philosophy, so in this sense the name is fitting.
  - forgotpwd16 4y ago
    >It is not clear what this comment would like to add. Maybe yet another one that misunderstood due to name that TeXmacs is about TeX, and then proceed to praise TeX. Then must rejoice because TeXmacs can produce equally high quality documents without the complexity, trial and error, package combination, etc.
    - Koshkin 4y ago
G3rn0ti 4y ago
It seems TeXmacs is MacOS only? Edit: Ah, they only provide MacOS installers on the download page. But they also provide a PPA for Ubuntu and Debian. Weird only ArchLinux and Gentoo provide official packages. https://www.texmacs.org/tmweb/download/linux.en.html https://www.texmacs.org/tmweb/download/linux.en.html
- mgubi 4y ago
  It is cross-platform, distributed for Windows, Linux and MacOS X. There is a port for Haiku (not maintained, but working). And you can find also AppImages from one of the developers, but not on the official page. Also you can try Mogan which is a distribution which try to be easier to install on a wide range of machines.
- 2b3a51 4y ago
  OpenBSD 7.2 has version 2.1.1 available as a package. Slackware has a SlackBuild script for 2.1.2 (slackbuilds.org). The epel 8 repository for RHEL and clones has version 2.1.1. I think that TeXmacs is pretty available generally.
sph 4y ago
Can TeXmacs be used as a generic Word clone with beautiful typesetting, or is it more suited for scientific papers and requires a lot of tweaking for plain documents? I write a couple of documents a year, and I'd really like them to be typeset beautifully than using Google Docs or Libreoffice Writer, which feel quite unsophisticated and bland. I typeset my resume in LaTeX and I wonder if I should port that to TeXmacs as well.
- mgubi 4y ago
  I use it for anything going from lecture notes, personal notes and plans, letters with university heading, presentations, cv. Some CV examples can be found here: https://github.com/texmacs/tm-forge/tree/main/examples https://github.com/texmacs/tm-forge/tree/main/examples for example this: https://github.com/texmacs/tm-forge/tree/main/examples/kjh-vita https://github.com/texmacs/tm-forge/tree/main/examples/kjh-v... some of them can be directly exported to HTML. For myself I use a simpler style and tweaked a bit the bibliography styles to get a list of my publications. I see no reason to use LaTeX to typeset anything which does not require to be sent to a publisher and even in that case I prefer to use TeXmacs for most of the life-cycle of the document and export to LaTeX as I export to PDF or HTML, i.e. for rendering purposes, or transmission. But I guess it depends very much on which kind of document are you thinking to. TeXmacs can be used (more or less out of the box) to create websites. The main TeXmacs page at www.texmacs.org is made with TeXmacs and also the blog at https://texmacs.github.io/notes/docs/overview.html https://texmacs.github.io/notes/docs/overview.html
- GiovanniP 4y ago
  I do think that TeXmacs can be used as a generic Word clone with beautiful typesetting, maybe "out-of-the-box", maybe with a little bit of tweaking. If you need tweaking, the forum at http://forum.texmacs.cn/ http://forum.texmacs.cn/ may be helpful. For the resume, you may want to check out some cv templates in https://github.com/texmacs/tm-forge https://github.com/texmacs/tm-forge under the `examples` directory.
fhchl 4y ago
Any chance that the TeXmacs format could be supported by Pandoc?

111 points by amichail 4y ago

This book was written by the main author of TeXmacs and previously only available in hard cover format. BTW, you can also make a donation from the download page.

Koshkin 4y ago
Thanks, just did. TeXmacs is one of the best examples of high quality free software.

spacewizard 4y ago

TeXmacs has been an excellent tool that has allowed me to quickly write numerous beautiful documents in the style of TeX during my PhD without all the struggle of TeX itself. I'd highly recommend anyone who regularly writes/types technical documents to give this a go. There is a small learning curve, but with the Jolly Writer now being freely available, I think the learning curve is significantly diminished. On top of this, there is a bustling community of users on http://forum.texmacs.cn http://forum.texmacs.cn who support one another when problems arise.

chungy 4y ago
It has some severe limitations if you really want to exploit what TeX allows you to do with layouting. That being said, most documents don't need to (ab)use TeX to that extent. TeXmacs is fine for probably over 99% of actual documents.
- spacewizard 4y ago
  Yes, of course it is not perfect and has limitations, but as you say, for the majority of purposes, I find it is a much easier tool to use. I've mostly used TeXmacs to quickly draft documents without having to deal with setting up a TeX environment. Once I am happy with my drafts, I write these up in LaTeX. Hopefully, in time TeXmacs will be more universally accepted that a post-writeup in LaTeX will not be necessary.
  - lr1970 4y ago
    > Once I am happy with my drafts, I write these up in LaTeX. If I am not mistken, TeXmacs can export into LaTeX directly.
- mgubi 4y ago
  I'm not sure which kind of limitations you are referring to. In my experience the only kind of things I cannot replicate with TeXmacs are variable width paragraphs to follows an arbitrary shape around an image. TeXmacs can do multi-column paragraphs, and complex layouts like this one: https://github.com/texmacs/tm-forge/tree/main/examples/resume-template https://github.com/texmacs/tm-forge/tree/main/examples/resum... or this one https://github.com/texmacs/tm-forge/blob/main/examples/exercises-template/exercises-template.png https://github.com/texmacs/tm-forge/blob/main/examples/exerc... or rich presentations like this one https://github.com/texmacs/tm-forge/blob/main/examples/lecture-slides-audoly/amphi08_tm.pdf https://github.com/texmacs/tm-forge/blob/main/examples/lectu... One should bear in mind that TeX by itself is a Turing-complete typesetting language while TeXmacs format is a format that is it restrict the range of documents one can express in order to be able to transform them more reliably, e.g. by conversion to HTML or PDF or even LaTeX. So certainly there are many more things you can to with TeX (but not with LaTeX itself) than with TeXmacs but this is a feature, not a bug :) (very much like the fact that you can do many more things with PS than with PDF, and that is why the first is a language while the second is a format).
  - GiovanniP 4y ago
    > So certainly there are many more things you can to with TeX (but not with LaTeX itself) than with TeXmacs Although TeXmacs plus its Scheme extension language is much more powerful than TeXmacs alone.

random314 4y ago

I wonder what texmacs template he used to author the book, it looks great.

spacewizard 4y ago
It does indeed, there are many options to choose from when you start up TeXmacs. From what I can tell, it seems to be a variation of `tmmanual` which can be found under: Focus>Styles>Documentation>TeXmacs>tmmanual. Hope this helps.

billyjobob 4y ago

All this time I assumed that GNU TeXmacs was was a GNU Emacs mode for editing TeX. Turns out it isn’t related to either Emacs or TeX. If only they hadn’t chosen such a doubly misleading name I might have been using this for the past 20 years.

mgubi 4y ago
It has been an unfortunate decision. Once in a while the community discuss to change the name, but no convincing proposal have emerged. On the other hand I really hear very few people complaining about JavaScript. So I guess, the name is not all here.

sho_hn 4y ago

TeX/LaTeX is so addictive to use ... It's such a quirky and messy ecosystem. So organically grown over decades. Doing any complex layout is a struggle of trial and error and searching for advise, there's so many ways to do the same thing, you end up combining two dozens sometimes subtly incompatible packages, you end up gardening your own templates over time with meticulously embedded commentary to keep the complexity at bay, you struggle to understand what's going on under the hood to reason about what's happening, you dive into source files, etc. But the thing is ... at the end of all that labor, it all works and the quality of the output is simply second to none. Making a beautiful doc with it makes you feel like a master carving a famous statue out of marble. Ultimately it feels like it couldn't have been done any other way, and you do love the end result dearly. I do keep half an eye on https://sile-typesetter.org/ https://sile-typesetter.org/ to see if it may become sort of a consolidated "LaTeX: The Good Parts" over time, replacing the cruft with a new baseline, but in the meantime I will keep treasuring my little zoo of .tex files.

amichail 4y ago
TeXmacs isn't based on TeX but nonetheless produces documents of similar quality.
- sho_hn 4y ago
  So I did already know that TeXmacs is not a LaTeX frontend (LaTeX being a set of TeX macros concerned with content organization, e.g. it's what gives you complex notions of things like "chapter" and "section" that you don't get from tex-core or tex-plain), but rather a WYSIWYG/M editor similar to LyX (LyX uses LaTeX under the hood). But I thought it does use the TeX engine under the hood for typesetting? I figured it's a WYSIWYG frontend that maps some sort of internal representation to a TeX output and throws it at TeX in the end, with its own LaTeX-type ideas for higher organization?
  - amichail 4y ago
    It uses its own real-time typesetter specifically designed for WYSIWYG editing. The typesetter is not TeX but is inspired by it.

spacewizard 4y ago

As an aside, a fork of TeXmacs has recently gained a lot of ground, called Mogan (https://mogan.app https://mogan.app) which is being developed alongside TeXmacs. Very usefully, they provide a means to test out TeXmacs/Mogan via your browser directly: https://mogan.app/wasm/Mogan.html https://mogan.app/wasm/Mogan.html I would enourage anyone interested to give this a go.

spacewizard 4y ago
Further, a demonstration of TeXmacs can be seen in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H46ON2FB30U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H46ON2FB30U

gsinclair 4y ago

This is great news. TeXmacs looks like a great project. Even though I don’t use it, I really appreciate there being options in the typesetting space, and dearly wish there were more. I wish they’d change the name, though — I ignored the project for a long long long time because of my reasonable presuppositions about it. JollyWriter is a very good replacement name, IMO.

mustardants199 4y ago

While the process of using TeX/LaTeX can be complex and require trial and error, combining multiple packages and customizing templates, the end result is high quality documents that feel like they could not have been produced any other way, and ultimately bring a sense of satisfaction and accomplishment to the user.

mgubi 4y ago
It is not clear what this comment would like to add. The presupposition that no other software can equal or surpass some magic powers of TeX/LaTeX has nothing to do with technical merit. Indeed I guess most users cannot distinguish a document produced with TeXmacs or with LaTeX. For example all these papers: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2212.05584.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2212.05584.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2112.05562.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2112.05562.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2210.15047.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2210.15047.pdf have been typesetted directly with TeXmacs with no intervention of LaTeX whatsoever. What use cases do you have in mind to support your claim? ps: it is clear that TeX is a complete typesetting language, but not a format. So TeXmacs need to be compared with some restricted set of LaTeX packages. The goals for the program is to deliver the user from the burden to be an expert to be able to compose beautiful and rich technical documents. But I would disagree that the ultimate goal of a system like TeX/LaTeX is to satisfy the 0.01% of hackers which enjoy spending their times coding in an obscure macro language (which is fun, I know, like composing documents directly writing PostScript programs). TeX was made to make possible beautiful typesetting and TeXmacs carry on this vision and philosophy, so in this sense the name is fitting.
- forgotpwd16 4y ago
  >It is not clear what this comment would like to add. Maybe yet another one that misunderstood due to name that TeXmacs is about TeX, and then proceed to praise TeX. Then must rejoice because TeXmacs can produce equally high quality documents without the complexity, trial and error, package combination, etc.
  - Koshkin 4y ago

G3rn0ti 4y ago

It seems TeXmacs is MacOS only? Edit: Ah, they only provide MacOS installers on the download page. But they also provide a PPA for Ubuntu and Debian. Weird only ArchLinux and Gentoo provide official packages. https://www.texmacs.org/tmweb/download/linux.en.html https://www.texmacs.org/tmweb/download/linux.en.html

mgubi 4y ago
It is cross-platform, distributed for Windows, Linux and MacOS X. There is a port for Haiku (not maintained, but working). And you can find also AppImages from one of the developers, but not on the official page. Also you can try Mogan which is a distribution which try to be easier to install on a wide range of machines.
2b3a51 4y ago
OpenBSD 7.2 has version 2.1.1 available as a package. Slackware has a SlackBuild script for 2.1.2 (slackbuilds.org). The epel 8 repository for RHEL and clones has version 2.1.1. I think that TeXmacs is pretty available generally.

sph 4y ago

Can TeXmacs be used as a generic Word clone with beautiful typesetting, or is it more suited for scientific papers and requires a lot of tweaking for plain documents? I write a couple of documents a year, and I'd really like them to be typeset beautifully than using Google Docs or Libreoffice Writer, which feel quite unsophisticated and bland. I typeset my resume in LaTeX and I wonder if I should port that to TeXmacs as well.

mgubi 4y ago
I use it for anything going from lecture notes, personal notes and plans, letters with university heading, presentations, cv. Some CV examples can be found here: https://github.com/texmacs/tm-forge/tree/main/examples https://github.com/texmacs/tm-forge/tree/main/examples for example this: https://github.com/texmacs/tm-forge/tree/main/examples/kjh-vita https://github.com/texmacs/tm-forge/tree/main/examples/kjh-v... some of them can be directly exported to HTML. For myself I use a simpler style and tweaked a bit the bibliography styles to get a list of my publications. I see no reason to use LaTeX to typeset anything which does not require to be sent to a publisher and even in that case I prefer to use TeXmacs for most of the life-cycle of the document and export to LaTeX as I export to PDF or HTML, i.e. for rendering purposes, or transmission. But I guess it depends very much on which kind of document are you thinking to. TeXmacs can be used (more or less out of the box) to create websites. The main TeXmacs page at www.texmacs.org is made with TeXmacs and also the blog at https://texmacs.github.io/notes/docs/overview.html https://texmacs.github.io/notes/docs/overview.html
GiovanniP 4y ago
I do think that TeXmacs can be used as a generic Word clone with beautiful typesetting, maybe "out-of-the-box", maybe with a little bit of tweaking. If you need tweaking, the forum at http://forum.texmacs.cn/ http://forum.texmacs.cn/ may be helpful. For the resume, you may want to check out some cv templates in https://github.com/texmacs/tm-forge https://github.com/texmacs/tm-forge under the `examples` directory.

fhchl 4y ago

Any chance that the TeXmacs format could be supported by Pandoc?