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Comment by lxpz | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

Would be nice if Pandoc supported did TeXmacs conversions in both directions. That would be something of a "security blanket" for many users.

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.

(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.

Another good reason IMO (3) another implementation of the conversion may be a useful reference/point of comparison

I agree that having more converters would be nice. But which formats are most urgent? A high school teacher would argue that we should support conversions for Word. Programmers would stress that we support Markdown or Pandoc. GNU hackers would ask us to support Texinfo. Any help is welcome...

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.)

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.

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.

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.

I got curious, downloaded the source, compiled with LaTeX and, separately, imported the source file in TeXmacs.

Perhaps there are a few points in which TeXmacs' import can be improved immediately (other things seem a bit more complex). I wrote a post at http://forum.texmacs.cn/t/latex-import-hacker-news-example/4...

One thing that makes a small part of the import not work is that in the LaTeX source some of the macros are defined after the start of the document, and TeXmacs sees them too late to take them into account when formatting the title.

Said this, TeXmacs finds the references, and LaTeX does not (I do not find the bibliography file, which is named "bibliography") ... how is this possible?

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