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Ask HN: Did TeXmacs' doubly misleading name hold it back for 20 years?

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Re: Ask HN: Did TeXmacs' doubly misleading name hold it back for 20 years?

#41

Post by wosined »

hprotagonist wrote: post #32
wosined wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Auctex, emacs and pdf-tools are good tools. I still use them. But you either compile LaTeX often, which gets very tedious once the compile time gets longer for larger documents, or you can get a confusing error message from LaTeX that takes you half an hour to deciper. That is my experience. Texmacs does the job of all of those tools better, except for Emacs, because Texmacs is not yet as big as Emacs, but it has mor…

> But you either compile LaTeX often, which gets very tedious once the compile time gets longer for larger documents, or you can get a confusing error message from LaTeX that takes you half an hour to deciper. That is my experience. have you played with rubber or latexmk? > Texmacs does the job of all of those tools better except for the “standard library” of the latex/tex/ctan world and vast seas of dependent work i…

I don't know what software you are using but, latexmk on my machine takes at least 30seconds to compile a 40 page document with 164 equations and 46 images. Texmacs doesn't have to, it just does the rendering incrementally, references get updated when you insert a new one. You can call an update on the whole buffer, which you normally don't have to, and it updates the same document in less than 6 seconds.

Some important LaTeX packages have workarounds or direct support. For example, you can still render your Tikz images in Texmacs, there is a Tikz repl, but afaik it needs some work. Or just import them as pdf and write the rest of the document in Texmacs.

You can customize the typsetting macros just by altering the texmacs file preamble, similar to how latex has a preamble, so do texmacs files.

No tool will have a standard library as big as TeX/LaTeX when it is created, if that is the bar you set for new software, then you will use TeX forever. That is fine, but maybe better tools can be created, they just require some investment.

Re: Ask HN: Did TeXmacs' doubly misleading name hold it back for 20 years?

#42

Post by mgubi »

hprotagonist wrote: post #32
wosined wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Auctex, emacs and pdf-tools are good tools. I still use them. But you either compile LaTeX often, which gets very tedious once the compile time gets longer for larger documents, or you can get a confusing error message from LaTeX that takes you half an hour to deciper. That is my experience. Texmacs does the job of all of those tools better, except for Emacs, because Texmacs is not yet as big as Emacs, but it has mor…

> But you either compile LaTeX often, which gets very tedious once the compile time gets longer for larger documents, or you can get a confusing error message from LaTeX that takes you half an hour to deciper. That is my experience. have you played with rubber or latexmk? > Texmacs does the job of all of those tools better except for the “standard library” of the latex/tex/ctan world and vast seas of dependent work i…

I would really like to have names of packages you use regularly and you think you will miss in any other system. I can think only of TikZ, and again, for targeted purposes like DSL you can always ask TeXmacs to run LaTeX and get the output. See e.g. https://twitter.com/gnu_texmacs/status/1605167149173153793

Re: Ask HN: Did TeXmacs' doubly misleading name hold it back for 20 years?

#43

Post by mgubi »

kzrdude wrote: post #28

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 La…

Not to mention JavaScript, then :)

Re: Ask HN: Did TeXmacs' doubly misleading name hold it back for 20 years?

#45

Post by 2b3a51 »

cahooon wrote: post #6

Wow, yep. I’d heard of it, and due to the name I never even bothered to look at it til seeing this post. Looks like amazing software.

Compare TeXmacs and LyX as visual scientific writing applications.

I have dipped my toe into TeXmacs (and bought a copy of The Jolly Writer to support the project). Basically you can walk up, bang out a couple of pages with text, mathematics, diagrams and (say) R script output nicely typeset and save as PDF or whatever. Ideal for quick papers and such.

TeXmacs does need a few processor cycles compared with LyX but you won't notice battery drain unduly on anything post Core Duo.

Addressing the actual question: I think a tag line like 'your libre scientific wordprocessor' would help.

Re: Ask HN: Did TeXmacs' doubly misleading name hold it back for 20 years?

#46

Post by GiovanniP »

mgubi wrote: post #42
hprotagonist wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But you either compile LaTeX often, which gets very tedious once the compile time gets longer for larger documents, or you can get a confusing error message from LaTeX that takes you half an hour to deciper. That is my experience. have you played with rubber or latexmk? > Texmacs does the job of all of those tools better except for the “standard library” of the latex/tex/ctan world and vast seas of dependent work i…

I would really like to have names of packages you use regularly and you think you will miss in any other system. I can think only of TikZ, and again, for targeted purposes like DSL you can always ask TeXmacs to run LaTeX and get the output. See e.g. https://twitter.com/gnu_texmacs/status/1605167149173153793

Packages for chemistry are useful, even if I don't use them myself. Also siunitx needs yet a TeXmacs equivalent (I think https://github.com/pireddag/SIunits/tree/simple is not yet good enough)

Re: Ask HN: Did TeXmacs' doubly misleading name hold it back for 20 years?

#48

Post by b33j0r »

marssaxman wrote: post #47
b33j0r wrote: post #36

If this is a problem, no one told Javascript

It was a problem, but everyone was forced to put up with Javascript anyway, and here we are...

Not disagreeing but here’s another lens. Applies to TeX as well.

“Java” in javascript kinda meant “modern computer programming” to the audience, in a very very inaccurate and zeitgeist-hype-train way.

People who thought “oh yeah, I’ve heard of java, and scripting sounds easier than programming,” looked into it.

ECMA wasn’t a thing yet, but it might have sounded like a skincare product to those same ears, or something that required college. The buzzwords worked.

Re: Ask HN: Did TeXmacs' doubly misleading name hold it back for 20 years?

#50

Post by sfpotter »

kzrdude wrote: post #38
sfpotter wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How 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.

I 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 pret…

It 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.

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