TeXmacs 1.99.14 released. Take a look at this research paper exported to HTML
texmacs.org
texmacs.org
Its developer, Joris van der Hoeven, is one of the co-authors of this research paper that has been exported to HTML, so I presume that the paper was written specifically in/for TeXmacs: your arbitrary LaTeX document won't be so easily importable into TeXmacs AFAIK.
> Grape-Nuts actually contains neither grapes nor nuts. It’s made from wheat and barley. So, why is it called Grape-Nuts? As with many great emblems in history, there are two versions of the story. One says that Mr. Post believed glucose, which he called “grape sugar,” formed during the baking process. This, combined with the nutty flavor of the cereal, is said to have inspired its name. Another explanation claims that the cereal got its name from its resemblance to grape seeds, or grape “nuts.”
"And?"
"No damn cat, and no damn cradle.”
Does TeXmacs at least have macros? (That's what "macs" stands for in Emacs)
'A cocky novice once said to Stallman: “I can guess why the editor is called Emacs, but why is the justifier called Bolio?”. Stallman replied forcefully, “Names are but names, ‘Emack & Bolio's’ is the name of a popular ice cream shop in Boston-town. Neither of these men had anything to do with the software.”
His question answered, yet unanswered, the novice turned to go, but Stallman called to him, “Neither Emack nor Bolio had anything to do with the ice cream shop, either.'
What it is, is a package that one can write such a paper in, and then "publish" it to the web. Which, as a special purpose CMS, has uses. Papers are a reasonably large body of work.
What I keep hoping for is a 'journal' that publishes papers in their mark up language that look good on the web, or when printed on paper, and retain meta data for good reference chasing. Further, the amount of typographic artifacts that should be thrown around with the paper would ideally be minimal and widely distributed/standardized.
This is a hard problem, and one of the first inspirations for creating the world wide web. So any efforts that so progress are to be lauded and this is one such effort.
In the end I gave up because LyX seemed better supported. I've not tried it for a long time. Since then I've learned to hate TeX vehemently; that system really needs to die. It would be good to have more alternatives. (TeXmacs itself isn't TeX, but uses some weird lisp-like syntax IIRC.)
TeX is a typesetting system that may be interesting to learn if you're interested in that sort of thing. LaTeX is a collection of TeX macros that are used while preparing documents, and probably isn't worth the effort to learn unless you have a specific need for it.
LaTeX has a number of positives. One is that it encourages the writer to focus upon the logical structure of documents, rather than the formatting. This is useful when preparing an articles or books for publication (when the publisher supports or accepts LaTeX). LaTeX is also good for certain types of technical publications, particularly those involving mathematics, since it handles the typesetting.
Beyond that, LaTeX is an unwieldy mess. If the standard macros don't do what you want of them, you either need to create your own or find some made by someone else. In many respects, it is like working with a library with programming. You'll need to figure out how to properly install those macros and you will need to figure out how to use them. Most people avoid the former by installing a rather massive TeX distribution that satisfies most of their needs. There is no way to get around the latter. You will have to read the documentation.
Once you have everything you need and know how to use it, there is the problem of creating the actual document. Tables and figures may not appear where you wish them to and there are times when you may wish to do something unusual, such as placing a wide table on it's own page and rotating it 90 degrees. Pretty much anything you may need to do is doable, but it is non-trivial to figure out. Not only is is non-trivial to do, but it is entangled in markup that is frequently difficult to read and may require a "compilation" to see the outcome.
None of that is meant to discourage you from learning LaTeX. There are cases where it is tremendously useful, it may be easier than the alternatives, and the quality of the product is usually quite good. The problem is that you pretty much need to know when to use LaTeX to reap the actual benefits.
This is the theory, but almost never been my experience. When I wrote for journals, and for my thesis, it was never the case where I could just use their style files and put in the content and the formatting would work out. Not even close. I always had to fiddle with formatting to get it to be good enough for the journal.
Bottom line: it's a leftover from the 1980s. In the 1980s it was probably quite good. So was the Commodore 64, but you wouldn't use it to write your thesis on in 2020, now, would you?
It's a mess of multiple command line tools which run each other. None of which I understand or want to learn. tex, xetex, latex, xelatex, biblatex, texi2dvi, latexmk... What?
Its error messages might be very useful if you were running them by hand in 1985, instead of via 5 other tools. Literally these messages say things like "just type ? now", as if I'm doing this shit manually. No, I'm not, because I desire to use a computer to automate these tasks.
It's a mess of multiple packages which redefine each others' macros. Namespacing? Ha ha ha. Look at this crap: https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/420448/error-illegal...
It gets in the way. If I open my article in a text editor, I want to see the title, author, abstract and first paragraph. Not 100 lines of backslashed computer blah. If I want to insert a picture, I don't want to have to write a paragraph of backslashed computer blah.
It's ugly. I don't want to see backslashes everywhere. I don't want to write `` to open quotation marks. I don't want to write \'e for é. I want to look at something nice when I write English.
Its model is that the markup specifies semantics, not syntax or layout. So you write \emph{} to emphasize something. This is bullshit. There are 100 reasons to use, e.g., italics: emphasis, foreign language, technical terms, etc. etc. Are we going to have a keyword for each of those? No. Just let me use italics. (Of course, they have that as well. Congratulations, you timewasters.)
Its culture is toxically up its own posterior. Oh, it's pronounced techhhh? Thank you for informing me, neccccchbeard. And if I have to read one more time "oh, don't use vertical lines in tables, just use \booktabs" in response to a question about HOW TO DO something....
Its toxic culture has infected academia. I've got referee reports saying "this wasn't written in TeX" as if that were a legitimate critique. PhD students are forced to learn it and spend nights crying and trying to make their tables work. Then they get Stockholm syndrome, become vastly proud that they know to write \ldots when they mean ..., and pass the filthy disease on to their students in turn.
tl:dr; Use HTML. Use Markdown. Use Microsoft Word. Hell, use RTF. Don't use TeX. Don't let your friends use TeX. Stop the madness now. Just Say No.
When will HTML be able to render maths natively?
And if it can, shouldn't Texmacs use that?
And the copy-pasted output isn't even very terrible.
MathML has terrible browser support [1] and often results in inconsistently rendered, ugly equations.
MathJax and KaTeX are nice but sometimes I prefer not to have JavaScript for these things that ought to be static.
It's being worked on again though https://www.chromestatus.com/feature/5240822173794304 by https://mathml.igalia.com/
https://asmaier.github.io/phdthesis
Source code is here: https://github.com/asmaier/phdthesis
[1] https://www.gnu.org/software/guile/news/gnu-guile-300-releas...
One killer feature that made it possible to take real-time class notes in TeXmacs is that one could type symbols like Greek letters by typing something like “a” then <tab> to get α. For fast and accurate math entry, TeXmacs > LyX > text editors with completion.
Join us to make GNU TeXmacs better.
For a typesetting demo, that is very unfortunate.
\usepackage[garamond]{mathdesign}
after running
sudo getnonfreefonts --sys -a
It would require that the authors also create and polish an HTML version, which is extra work.
Even on the official IEEE sites papers look way worse in the HTML view, even though I guess someone at least tries to tweak the to appear okayish.
Purists would argue to separate the "presentation layer" from the underlying content, but it's never like that in the messy real world. Content and presentation are very much intertwined and abstractions are too leaky.