Will everyone switch to TeXmacs, which is truly WYSIWYG and does not use TeX/LaTeX?
Another alternative is LyX, which actually does use LaTeX. Even that is not really a "LaTeX editor" though: it produces/exports excellent LaTeX, and uses that for typesetting, but does pretty poorly at importing LaTeX (as the developers freely admit). Depending on your situation that may or may not be a problem: if you just have to give a journal the final result in LaTeX then you can use LyX to produce it, but if you want to collarboratively work on a paper with someone else who wants to use raw LaTeX then it wouldn't be suitable. I wrote my masters thesis, course notes, and PhD thesis in LyX and would strongly recommend it - although it's a GUI I would argue it has a stronger learning curve than raw LaTeX, but leaves you more productive in the end.
As far as I know, an importer that interprets arbitrary LaTeX cannot exist (i.e. you have to run LaTeX on the file) because the grammar of LaTeX documents is Turing-complete. There is a StackExchange Q&A where this is explained, but I do not understand the arguments ;-)
I think this applies to the natural output of TeX's "mouth" as well, i.e. one could exapnd LaTeX macros till one obtains TeX primitives, but at that point the information on structure is already lost.
Right, but the output is a typeset document. The fact that LaTeX (the program) can do this is no evidence at all that it would be possible to build a program that converts LaTeX (the format) into some intermediate representation that make sense to a human. For example, assuming that macros are recursively expanded in place, it's possible that there's no clear dividing line between "this is a user macro that should be expanded before exporting" and "this is an internal macro that should not be expanded" (e.g. you probably want to leave "theorem environment" from AMS package unexpanded because that is semantic information you'd want when you edit the document). As another example, what should be a table or equation etc. might end up as individual lines and characters floating around as separate elements on a page.
Personally I never really needed LaTeX import so I don't really see it as a problem, but I know it matters to some people.
Yep. It sounds like something that ties emacs and LaTeX together. That's not something I'd even want to look at, and have not for exactly that reason. My goto math tool is Maxima, but I don't write so typesetting isn't a thing for me - it does support MathML though IIRC.
Overleaf has decent tab completion and dozens of templates, as well as limited support for markdown. Let tabnine and copilot get to LaTeX; I think we’ll find the discoverability of “text language on Adderall” outguns GUIs.
No way. Nothing can outgun typing a parameter into a box rather than the visual clutter of braces (or some other delimiter). What's more, maths notation often involves objects of different sizes, which isn't reflected in any fixed-width text language. Equations in my PhD were often 80% about the subscripts/superscripts if you read the raw LaTeX, with the most important stuff buried away; but when you look at the equation as rendered, or in a GUI, the most important bits are trivial to read off.
> lyx as a hard to get into GUI
I only suggest LyX is hard to get into because some people only get into it at a surface level, which it's actually very easy to get into but then you don't get all the benefits of LaTeX. Best case scenario is you know both LaTeX and how to use LyX, then you can spend 1% of your time writing bits of LaTeX (in the preamble, or using math macros [1], or directly including the odd snippet of raw LaTeX as a last resort (even then put them within an instant preview)) and 99% of your time using the GUI.
Basically the reverse of your usage as the learning went on, and then finally going to pure LaTeX sometime in the foggy past.
{
\def \l {\mathrm{l}}
\def \r {\mathrm{r}}
\def \Bl {\mathrm{Bl}}
\def \Br {\mathrm{Br}}
\def \B {\mathrm{B}}
\def \nIIom {n_{2\omega}}
\begin{equation}\label{eq:interface_conditions}
\begin{aligned}
F_{1\l} &= F_{2\r} + F_{2\l} \exp (i\,k_2 L) + F_{\Br} + F_{\Bl} \exp(i\,k_\B L) \\
F_{1\r} &= -\nIIom \, F_{2\r} + \nIIom \, F_{2\l} \exp (i\,k_2 L) - \nIIom \, F_{\Br} +
\nIIom \, F_{\Bl} \exp(i\,k_\B L)\\
F_{3\r} &= F_{2\r} \exp (i\,k_2 L) + F_{2\l} + F_{\Br} \exp(i\,k_\B L) + F_{\Bl} \\
-F_{3\l} &= \nIIom \, F_{2\r} \exp (i\,k_2 L) + \nIIom \, F_{2\l} -
\nIIom \, F_{\Br} \exp(i\,k_\B L) + \nIIom \, F_{\Bl}
\end{aligned}
\end{equation}
}
F_{1\mathrm{l}} &= F_{2\mathrm{r}} + F_{2\mathrm{l}} \exp (i\,k_2 L) + F_{\mathrm{Br}} + F_{\mathrm{Bl}} \exp(i\,k_\mathrm{B} L)
...
On the other hand, you don't write complicated mathematical equations quickly if you've got any sense anyway.
I don't get this line of reasoning. Writing equations is hard, so what difference does it make if you make it a lot harder? I think the fact it's hard makes it even more important to make it easier to write!
Proofreading / editing (as opposed to writing) is even more severe. When using raw LaTeX, there's absolutely no way you can be sure the equation is right without checking the PDF, so you end up in a slow loop of typesetting (the whole document!), read something for a while, go back to the LaTeX to fix something you've found, spend a while finding where the problem is, etc.; in LyX you're just organically reading and editing the document. If you spot an incorrect subscript, you just click on it and fix it then carry on reading. In raw LaTeX that can 100 times as long, or even longer still if you take into account the context switch of your mind.
And I second your endorsement of Overleaf. I had to write a research proposal a few weeks back for work after not touching academic writing for 7 years. Overleaf made the process relatively painless.
OTOH, Wikipedia informs me that "Lich" is actually pronounced "ˈlɪtʃ", so the pun wouldn't have worked anyway. I was pronouncing the "ch" like the one in "Leiche" in German until now. Oh well...
I think that there are good points in switching document preparation system. Differently from LaTeX, TeXmacs can be programmed in a sensible way (it uses Scheme), and differently from Word you have access to the source. It is superior enough to both systems that the future standard will work according to the ideas implemented in it, I think.
- referencing is a nightmare (this is probably the worst aspect). \label and \ref or \eqref? No, remember the equation number, click the References tab, Cross-Reference, select "equation" from the "Reference type" dropdown list, scroll down to the equation whose number you should remember, click "Insert". Did you add remove/an equation, thereby changing all subsequent equation numbers? Let's hope "Update all fields" works on the first try (hint: it won't).
- AMS math standards, \mathbb{R}, \mathcal{R}? No, \doubleR, \scriptR.
- \bar{x}? No, \bar SPACE SPACE left-arrow x right-arrow.
- \begin{align*}? No, good luck. (Actually I haven't even figured this one out).
- Version control? No, "Track changes". Oh, you changed a subscript or superscript? Your file is corrupted and cannot be saved, Ctrl-z until you can save and hope you remember all your changes.
- Seamless math typing if you are fast and proficient at LaTeX? No, Alt+= and hold on while I catch up. Did you go too fast? Sorry, Word has stopped responding. (This is a real problem in a 50+ page Word document full of math.)
Those are just the ones off the top of my head.
+1 for TeXmacs being superior to both Word and LaTeX. After using LaTeX for years I tried TeXmacs for a week and never looked back.
Try and use the GUST fonts (http://www.gust.org.pl/projects/e-foundry), Microsoft Word equations will look then excellently made. The last time I used the GUST fonts, by the way, I was able to export Word documents to pdf only be printing, as using the pdf converter some glyphs would "lose pieces"; and exporting via printing I would lose the clickable links. But I did not try with the Word plugin for the latest versions of Acrobat.
I enjoy emacs a lot also, so is a two lose moves in one step