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Comment by albertzeyer | Hacker News Reader

> 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?

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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.

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.

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.

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