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Comment by BlueTemplar | Hacker News Reader

(La)TeX is being hobbled anyway by having so many non-UTF-8-first legacy tools and not being able to directly export to a document format appropriate for electronic documents.

What about the readability of HTML exported by TeXmacs ? Can you reverse import that HTML without losses ? Can the HTML be exported as a single file ? (MTHML ? (Firefox Y U no support ?? :'( ))

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I'm not sure I understand a use case for lossless reverse HTML import. TeXmacs can import HTML (e.g. Wikipedia pages) including proper recovery of mathematical formulas from MathJaX or MathML. TeXmacs can export HTML with math in MathML (since 2005), MathJaX or images according to user preferences. The exported HTML human-readable (although with some CSS here and there) like the LaTeX export (who say the contrary has visibly never used TeXmacs, at least recently). You can check the quality of the HTML export by looking at TeXmacs website (https://www.texmacs.org/tmweb/home/welcome.en.html) and at the blog (https://texmacs.github.io/notes/docs/main.html) or also at this other blog (https://plopezadeva.com) or at the webpage of Joris van der Hoeven, the main developer (http://www.texmacs.org/joris/main/joris.html). Comments and suggestions for improvements are welcome. TeXmacs do not use UTF-8 (or any other Unicode encoding) internally but support an arbitrary, extensible encoding (much like Unicode) which can be converted to Unicode without problems. The reason is simple: TeXmacs was initiated before Unicode was widely supported (~1998). Even in current times we see few reason to move to Unicode, all the TeXmacs internals are independent from external libraries or tools. It was properly working in ~1999, it works now and it will work as long as a minimal C++ compiler works.

Thanks for the details !

The use case would be collaboration with people that might not be using TeXmacs themselves,(M)HTML being the document format.

That is always tricky. HTML is a presentation language in many ways since the use of tricks or inline CSS is not forbidden. So the problem of interaction with it is similar with the problem of interaction with LaTeX (which however adds on top the macro problem). We are doing research on conservative conversion from LaTeX and probably similar techniques could be used for HTML. However I think would be more meaningful to aim to Markdown or some restricted versions of HTML as common format, since this will is easier to map reasonably well to the TeXmacs document format. I wonder if tools like PanDoc have these bidirectional conversion capabilities themselves. We are planning to have a conservative conversion for Markdown documents (meaning that local edits in TeXmacs only change locally the original Markdown document)

For the readability of HTML exported by TeXmacs, please take a look yourself at the html files in https://github.com/texmacs/notes/tree/main/docs I think that the developers would be happy to hear any comment on that topic. I am not able to answer your other questions, I hope someone else will answer them.

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