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Things that are great usually come through anyway. Is that too optimistic? If you think Texmacs is great, maybe it also has come over a threshold to greatness -
by kzrdude 4y ago
Things that are great usually come through anyway. Is that too optimistic?
If you think Texmacs is great, maybe it also has come over a threshold to greatness - it wasn't there for all of the past 20 years(?) Things such as your outreach in this post is what's needed for a great program to become more well known.
My spontaneous feeling is that it's very upsetting that it has TeX in the name but does not use Tex or Latex.
- sfpotter 4y agoHow does it not use LaTeX? It imports and exports LaTeX, which is a way of using LaTeX. It’s a useful tool in the LaTeX ecosystem.
- wosined 4y agoHe means that the equations in the TeXmacs buffer are not rendered by LaTeX and imported as images (as in Emacs), but by TeXmacs. You can edit each part of the rendered equation in realtime, without having to write source code as in LaTeX, similar to MSWord, but with the typesetting quality of LaTeX and with the movement keys of Emacs.
- kzrdude 4y agoI don't use it, so I don't know. This is how texmacs describe it themselves: “Converters exist for TeX/LaTeX and Html/Mathml. Notice that TeXmacs is not based on TeX/LaTeX.” To me that sounds like a tool that is not for working with Latex, but it can convert in a pinch. It's a different category, it's own thing. Fine, but not Tex/Latex. The “Limitations of the TeXmacs to LaTeX converter” from their webpage sound pretty severe, aligns with this view.
- sfpotter 4y agoIt was a rhetorical question. I understand how TeXmacs works. It does use LaTeX: it contains a usable LaTeX importer/exporter. Yes, the importer and exporter aren’t perfect, but they are used in a nontrivial capacity nevertheless. LaTeX is such an integral part of the research workflow for so many academics that leaving it behind entirely is not an option. So instead many people use TeXmacs to generate LaTeX for submission e.g. to a journal. To me, this means that it is a LaTeX tool. Maybe this is not exactly the intended use case, but here we are.
- mgubi 4y agoThe phrase "it uses LaTeX" means that it runs the program LaTeX or that it need the "LaTeX format". Neither is true. Similarly you would say that "PanDoc uses Word?" or that a program that export to Word use Word. To me if you want to say that a program exports to a particular format just say so. If you want to say that a program needs a working installation of another program Y to work then you can say "it uses Y". So I think it is not correct to say that TeXmacs uses LaTeX. It can import/export it, like it can export/import PDF, HTML and other formats. TeXmacs does not need a working LateX installation to work. It comes with all its batteries included and on the Mac the app weight < 150 MB. That's all you need (including the LaTeX importer/exporter which is written in Scheme).
- sfpotter 4y agoPart of the problem is that LaTeX is meant in multiple senses: there is the LaTeX installation along with all relevant programs, and then there is the LaTeX format/programming language. When I say I "use C", it means that I write C programs. In this sense, TeXmacs does use (the) LaTeX (programming language). It includes Scheme code which translates the internal TeXmacs format to LaTeX for obvious and extremely useful reasons. To me that means it uses LaTeX. YMMV.
- wosined 4y agoInstalling it sucks. Once I got through that hurdle I liked it. However, I do think most people won't bother if the executable downloaded from the main website just doesn't run.
- mgubi 4y agoYou can just pick the AppImage if you like Linux. No installation needed. If you are on Mac, then you just need to give permission to run the software, it is not a specific problem of TeXmacs, it happens because TeXmacs executable are not signed. There are many reason you can turn down a software. any software. The point is: to whom are you making a favour? :) TeXmacs is free and make you save a lot of time. So I would say it is worth to spend a bit of it learning to use it properly. To be effective it require you to unlearn some LaTeX habits. But again, it is up to you. What I think is unfair is to deduce from these features that it is not a useful piece of software.
- GiovanniP 4y agoOn the other hand if something (in this case ease of installation) helps people to use the tool, then it helps TeXmacs too, which in turn helps users.
- mgubi 4y agoNot to mention JavaScript, then :)
- kzrdude 4y agoExactly, the same kind of name problem.