TeXmacs “The Jolly Writer” book is now available as pdf download
scypress.com
scypress.com
There is a small learning curve, but with the Jolly Writer now being freely available, I think the learning curve is significantly diminished.
On top of this, there is a bustling community of users on http://forum.texmacs.cn who support one another when problems arise.
That being said, most documents don't need to (ab)use TeX to that extent. TeXmacs is fine for probably over 99% of actual documents.
I've mostly used TeXmacs to quickly draft documents without having to deal with setting up a TeX environment. Once I am happy with my drafts, I write these up in LaTeX.
Hopefully, in time TeXmacs will be more universally accepted that a post-writeup in LaTeX will not be necessary.
If I am not mistken, TeXmacs can export into LaTeX directly.
Although TeXmacs plus its Scheme extension language is much more powerful than TeXmacs alone.
I would enourage anyone interested to give this a go.
It's such a quirky and messy ecosystem. So organically grown over decades. Doing any complex layout is a struggle of trial and error and searching for advise, there's so many ways to do the same thing, you end up combining two dozens sometimes subtly incompatible packages, you end up gardening your own templates over time with meticulously embedded commentary to keep the complexity at bay, you struggle to understand what's going on under the hood to reason about what's happening, you dive into source files, etc.
But the thing is ... at the end of all that labor, it all works and the quality of the output is simply second to none. Making a beautiful doc with it makes you feel like a master carving a famous statue out of marble. Ultimately it feels like it couldn't have been done any other way, and you do love the end result dearly.
I do keep half an eye on https://sile-typesetter.org/ to see if it may become sort of a consolidated "LaTeX: The Good Parts" over time, replacing the cruft with a new baseline, but in the meantime I will keep treasuring my little zoo of .tex files.
But I thought it does use the TeX engine under the hood for typesetting? I figured it's a WYSIWYG frontend that maps some sort of internal representation to a TeX output and throws it at TeX in the end, with its own LaTeX-type ideas for higher organization?
That actually makes me much more interested in TeXmacs, since an independent implementation puts it at the same level as something like SILE (with a very different user interface story, of course). Now I'm quite curious to check it out to see what kind of quality I could get out of it.
Looks like the naming is a topic for discussion in the community: http://forum.texmacs.cn/t/why-some-people-get-upset-when-the...
BTW, you can also make a donation from the download page.
JollyWriter is a very good replacement name, IMO.
Hope this helps.
I write a couple of documents a year, and I'd really like them to be typeset beautifully than using Google Docs or Libreoffice Writer, which feel quite unsophisticated and bland.
I typeset my resume in LaTeX and I wonder if I should port that to TeXmacs as well.
Edit: Ah, they only provide MacOS installers on the download page. But they also provide a PPA for Ubuntu and Debian. Weird only ArchLinux and Gentoo provide official packages.
I think that TeXmacs is pretty available generally.
ps: it is clear that TeX is a complete typesetting language, but not a format. So TeXmacs need to be compared with some restricted set of LaTeX packages. The goals for the program is to deliver the user from the burden to be an expert to be able to compose beautiful and rich technical documents. But I would disagree that the ultimate goal of a system like TeX/LaTeX is to satisfy the 0.01% of hackers which enjoy spending their times coding in an obscure macro language (which is fun, I know, like composing documents directly writing PostScript programs). TeX was made to make possible beautiful typesetting and TeXmacs carry on this vision and philosophy, so in this sense the name is fitting.
Maybe yet another one that misunderstood due to name that TeXmacs is about TeX, and then proceed to praise TeX. Then must rejoice because TeXmacs can produce equally high quality documents without the complexity, trial and error, package combination, etc.