Do you think the doubly misleading name has held back this WYSIWYG scientific editor with quality comparable to TeX/LaTeX for two decades?
I have dipped my toe into TeXmacs (and bought a copy of The Jolly Writer to support the project). Basically you can walk up, bang out a couple of pages with text, mathematics, diagrams and (say) R script output nicely typeset and save as PDF or whatever. Ideal for quick papers and such.
TeXmacs does need a few processor cycles compared with LyX but you won't notice battery drain unduly on anything post Core Duo.
Addressing the actual question: I think a tag line like 'your libre scientific wordprocessor' would help.
I usually need to lean relatively hard on CTAN, and if you’ve got a niche tool with better UX but no widespread adoption in a very entrenched user base, you’re not going to take over.
when i want “texmacs”, i use the other GNU tools: https://www.gnu.org/software/auctex/ , emacs, and pdf-tools.
Yet I think that it is necessary to keep promoting TeXmacs, a niche yet nice tool, as the shortcomings of TeX are significant and I think we need a better took for document preparation.
have you played with rubber or latexmk?
> Texmacs does the job of all of those tools better
except for the “standard library” of the latex/tex/ctan world and vast seas of dependent work in the ecosystem, which i don’t believe it addresses at all, but is the main thrust of my original post.
Some important LaTeX packages have workarounds or direct support. For example, you can still render your Tikz images in Texmacs, there is a Tikz repl, but afaik it needs some work. Or just import them as pdf and write the rest of the document in Texmacs.
You can customize the typsetting macros just by altering the texmacs file preamble, similar to how latex has a preamble, so do texmacs files.
No tool will have a standard library as big as TeX/LaTeX when it is created, if that is the bar you set for new software, then you will use TeX forever. That is fine, but maybe better tools can be created, they just require some investment.
someone once described this to me as “treating latex as the IR” which seems relatively correct; for me, it’s a nice way to square the circle of “i want *.tex eventually, but i’d like to write it without as much fuss”.
TeXmacs isn’t new software that was just created, though.
To be more specific, I thought it was a Mac utility for creating formulas in latex.
Producing documents for publication is a big part of the reason for using software like TeX, both because of its capabilities and requirements of the publisher. Given the audience of TeXmacs appears similar to that of TeX, in terms of capabilities but not the requirements of publishers, it was not terribly appealing to a wide audience and a significant factor holding it back for its specialized audience.
That said, the name did encourage me to at least look at it back in my university days (a very long time ago). When I found that it was not a front-end for TeX, I simply moved on.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27604311
where he talks about the same issue.
Converters whose source, target, or both are Turing complete languages are... not uncommon in computing.
You can convert org-mode files into texmacs files by exporting to latex and then importing the latex into texmacs.
Emacs cannot render latex with such quality even with image previews. Trust me, I'm using Emacs.
The typesetting algorithm is based on TeX, but it is a custom rewrite with tweaks afaik.
There are interfaces to python, maxima, octave, matlab, asymptote, graphviz, sympy etc. that let you type the code into the buffer and see the graphical output of those programs, i.e. figures. Similar to a notebook. Texmacs can typeset the symbolic equations that you get from maxima, so you don't have to see the source code with code syntax but the result a rendered equation. Does emacs have a repl that returns rendered equations?
It is also possible to use the python, maxima, etc. plugins to evaluate expressions in the body of your text in a texmacs file.
You can create presentations with animations with interactive code sessions and typeset all the math in the presentation with the algorithm derived from TeX.
The main implementation uses gnu guile as an extension language, thus if you like Emacs lisp you will get along with texmacs too.
You can link texmacs files together and create a wiki structure (think org-mode links etc.) and you can export this structure into HTML. This allows you to write a website in texmacs and then export it into HTML with your custom css.
You can typesetting algorithms in the same manner as with the algorithm* packages of latex, but with realtime rendering without having to recompile or guess the layout.
Texmacs also offers Emacs like keybindings so that you can open files with C-x C-f, move the cursor with C-f, C-b, C-n, C-p and other Emacs like bindings.
Up to this point it did not occur to me that TeXmacs is _not_ using TeX at all.
I guess that I am not alone with that thought. Does it use Emacs, then?
“Java” in javascript kinda meant “modern computer programming” to the audience, in a very very inaccurate and zeitgeist-hype-train way.
People who thought “oh yeah, I’ve heard of java, and scripting sounds easier than programming,” looked into it.
ECMA wasn’t a thing yet, but it might have sounded like a skincare product to those same ears, or something that required college. The buzzwords worked.
ECMA is much older than JS.
ECMAScript wasn’t a thing yet, I think you mean.
i'd could also see the name implying connection to Mexican food or Macintosh computers.
I usually work with TexWorks or texstudio.
My spontaneous feeling is that it's very upsetting that it has TeX in the name but does not use Tex or Latex.
You can edit each part of the rendered equation in realtime, without having to write source code as in LaTeX, similar to MSWord, but with the typesetting quality of LaTeX and with the movement keys of Emacs.
This is how texmacs describe it themselves: “Converters exist for TeX/LaTeX and Html/Mathml. Notice that TeXmacs is not based on TeX/LaTeX.”
To me that sounds like a tool that is not for working with Latex, but it can convert in a pinch. It's a different category, it's own thing. Fine, but not Tex/Latex.
The “Limitations of the TeXmacs to LaTeX converter” from their webpage sound pretty severe, aligns with this view.
It does use LaTeX: it contains a usable LaTeX importer/exporter. Yes, the importer and exporter aren’t perfect, but they are used in a nontrivial capacity nevertheless. LaTeX is such an integral part of the research workflow for so many academics that leaving it behind entirely is not an option. So instead many people use TeXmacs to generate LaTeX for submission e.g. to a journal. To me, this means that it is a LaTeX tool. Maybe this is not exactly the intended use case, but here we are.