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Comment by spacewizard | Hacker News Reader

TeXmacs has been an excellent tool that has allowed me to quickly write numerous beautiful documents in the style of TeX during my PhD without all the struggle of TeX itself. I'd highly recommend anyone who regularly writes/types technical documents to give this a go.

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.

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It has some severe limitations if you really want to exploit what TeX allows you to do with layouting.

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.

Yes, of course it is not perfect and has limitations, but as you say, for the majority of purposes, I find it is a much easier tool to use.

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.

> Once I am happy with my drafts, I write these up in LaTeX.

If I am not mistken, TeXmacs can export into LaTeX directly.

I'm not sure which kind of limitations you are referring to. In my experience the only kind of things I cannot replicate with TeXmacs are variable width paragraphs to follows an arbitrary shape around an image. TeXmacs can do multi-column paragraphs, and complex layouts like this one: https://github.com/texmacs/tm-forge/tree/main/examples/resum... or this one https://github.com/texmacs/tm-forge/blob/main/examples/exerc... or rich presentations like this one https://github.com/texmacs/tm-forge/blob/main/examples/lectu... One should bear in mind that TeX by itself is a Turing-complete typesetting language while TeXmacs format is a format that is it restrict the range of documents one can express in order to be able to transform them more reliably, e.g. by conversion to HTML or PDF or even LaTeX. So certainly there are many more things you can to with TeX (but not with LaTeX itself) than with TeXmacs but this is a feature, not a bug :) (very much like the fact that you can do many more things with PS than with PDF, and that is why the first is a language while the second is a format).

> So certainly there are many more things you can to with TeX (but not with LaTeX itself) than with TeXmacs

Although TeXmacs plus its Scheme extension language is much more powerful than TeXmacs alone.

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