[HN Gopher] TeXmacs 2.1
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TeXmacs 2.1
Author : amichail
Score : 94 points
Date : 2021-06-23 11:04 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.texmacs.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.texmacs.org)
| syockit wrote:
| TeXmacs 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.
| mgubi wrote:
| I 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.
| vdhoeven wrote:
| I 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).
| tut-urut-utut wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| Yes, 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 wrote:
| You 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.
| sadhen wrote:
| I've tuned default font for Korean for GNU TeXmacs 2.1
|
| I wonder if there are any Korean GNU TeXmacs users browsing
| Hacker News.
| avindroth wrote:
| Here! I never used Korean in it though.
| samuel wrote:
| How does it compare to LyX?
| amichail wrote:
| Unlike LyX, TeXmacs is truly WYSIWYG and does not use
| TeX/LaTeX.
| e3bc54b2 wrote:
| Which is its greatest strength and greatest weakness :)
| GiovanniP wrote:
| There 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 wrote:
| Well, 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 wrote:
| About 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 wrote:
| Years 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)
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _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)._
|
| If anyone wants to play with this there are 'online editors'
| so you don't even have to download/install software nowadays:
|
| * https://latex.codecogs.com/eqneditor/editor.php
|
| This one renders on-screen, as well as allowing downloads as
| GIF/PNG/PDF/SVG to perhaps embed in other document systems.
| (Plenty of others as well.)
| GiovanniP wrote:
| https://www.mathcha.io/editor is closer to the idea of
| TeXmacs (editing the typeset document, not the source)
| asdf_snar wrote:
| https://www.mathcha.io/editor is indeed much closer to
| TeXmacs than
| https://latex.codecogs.com/eqneditor/editor.php. No
| matter how instant the rendering is, the latter is still
| split-screen. It may not seem like much, but when you are
| knee-deep in a calculation the advantage of having a
| single point of focus for your eyes is huge (at least to
| me).
| samuel wrote:
| Thanks, I'll look into it. I enrolled in a Master' Degree
| after almost 20 years out of the University, and had to do
| some mathy reports. Forgotten most of my raw LaTeX skills and
| not interested on doing the investment again, went directly
| into LyX, which I remembered it was already nice in the 00's.
| It was OK.
|
| But if I have the time(and the need), I'll try TeXmacs.
| snicker7 wrote:
| TeXmacs 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 wrote:
| The 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..
| albertzeyer wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| The 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 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 wrote:
| I 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.
| vdhoeven wrote:
| Both conversions from and to LaTeX are of top quality.
|
| The conversion from LaTeX into TeXmacs have been tested on a
| large number of documents downloaded from ArXiv.
|
| The conservative conversion options are experimental, but they
| can be used in TeXmacs 2.1.
|
| I don't know of any other similarly good converters between
| LaTeX and another format.
| teleforce wrote:
| Obligatory link for the only book on TeXmacs by its author:
|
| [1]https://www.scypress.com/book_info.html
| lxpz wrote:
| I'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 wrote:
| I 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.
| sundarurfriend wrote:
| FWIW that comment reads like a significant endorsement of
| TeXmacs to me. The comments about conversion sound more like
| practical concerns rather than pointing fingers and blaming.
| They're clear on their opinion of LaTeX as a horrible mess,
| so it's unlikely they're going to disagree with your
| assessment in the last paragraph.
|
| I understand that it can be frustrating when something you've
| worked hard on gets (seemingly) inaccurately portrayed, but I
| think you comment takes an unnecessarily defensive and
| passive aggressive tone against what's largely a supportive
| comment. (I'm assuming you're the creator/major developer of
| TeXmacs, based on other comments in the thread about naming
| choice.)
| vdhoeven wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 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.
| bachmeier wrote:
| Would be nice if Pandoc supported did TeXmacs conversions in
| both directions. That would be something of a "security
| blanket" for many users.
| mgubi wrote:
| In 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.
| bachmeier wrote:
| (1) You may want to work with other formats. (2) You may
| not trust TeXmacs to be around in the future or to be
| installed on the machines you use. The ability to convert
| using Pandoc would not prevent anyone from using the
| existing conversions.
| GiovanniP wrote:
| Another good reason IMO (3) another implementation of the
| conversion may be a useful reference/point of comparison
| agumonkey wrote:
| interesting a *macs that really uses guile :)
| eggy wrote:
| It 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.
| tlamponi wrote:
| > 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
| soegaard wrote:
| What are the changes from 2.0 to 2.1 ?
| amichail wrote:
| You can find the changelog here:
| https://www.texmacs.org/tmweb/about/changes.en.html
| vdhoeven wrote:
| See also
|
| https://www.texmacs.org/tmweb/home/news.en.html
| GiovanniP wrote:
| The 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 wrote:
| And although it's called "TeXmacs", it doesn't use TeX, LaTeX,
| or Emacs, and is not (natively, anyway) compatible with them.
| povik wrote:
| Although you can use a lot of latex commands to enter math,
| which is useful when you are starting with texmacs after
| exposure to latex
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