Hacker News Reader

Comment by GiovanniP | Hacker News Reader

While Typst appears to be popular, I think that TeXmacs, https://www.texmacs.org/, which is a program independent from both TeX and Emacs, is the kind of program that we need for writing: a fully WYSIWYG, fully structured document preparation system, in which you edit the structure of your document in a WYSIWYG way. When editing the structure on-screen, the user has no need to be aware that is doing so, as it looks like they are editing a text document; at the same time, the TeXmacs editor will guide the user to keeping a structured document.

View on HN

I disagree. Many people abhor WYSIWYG programs, myself included.

Having tried both TeXmacs and Typst¹, it’s easy for me to understand why Typst is rapidly gaining adoption and why, after — how long, over a decade? — essentially nobody uses TeXmacs.

[1] https://lwn.net/Articles/1037577/

I haven't tried TeXmacs (thanks to the truly abysmal name I assumed it was something to do with Emacs), but I have used LyX and it changed my opinion on WYSIWYG. It isn't a fundamentally flawed idea, it's just that most implementations of it are.

LyX is specifically advertised not as WYSIWYG, but WYSIWYM ('M' = "Mean"). Note how the exported/final document looks very little like the in-UI one.

Typora & Obsidian apply the same ideas to Markdown.

I do think WYSIWYG is an absolutely broken paradigm for anything outside of literally just desktop publishing --- but WYSIWYM has a lot of merit.

Enough that I've been working on a stand-alone Markdown editor component that takes ideas from Typora et al.

I think it is fair to point at a paper where Van der Hoeven argues in detail in favor of the WYSIWYG paradigm:

J. van der Hoeven. GNU TeXmacs: a free, structured, wysiwyg and technical text editor. In Daniel Filipo, editor, Le document au XXI-ième siècle, volume 39–40, pages 39–50. Metz, 14–17 mai 2001. Actes du congrès GUTenberg.

Reproduced at https://www.texmacs.org/Data/TeXmacs.pdf

For why so few people use TeXmacs, it may be that it is because few people believe that it is worth trying, as one would not expect that it works so well :-)

> For why so few people use TeXmacs

It's because they gave it a terrible name that strongly implies it's some kind of Emacs TeX editor.

Sure but that's just because they're making a point about how it isn't as shit as WYSIWYG implies. Really, it is WYSIWYG (even if the output doesn't exactly match the editing experience). It's just good WYSIWYG.

Ooo I thought of another example of good WYSIWYG - Qt Creator's form editor. The only good GUI form editor I've used. Again the editing experience doesn't exactly match the output (e.g. some layout features are visible), but it's clearly WYSIWYG. It just doesn't suck like MS Word.

IIRC TeXmacs supports only quite limited subset of what LaTeX and TeX can do. Just like LyX, it could create new documents but will often fail opening ones that were created outside of it.

I think it is so. As far as I know, there are no converters that can do that. A search with an LLM made me find https://arxiv.org/pdf/2605.16562, a paper describing the ArXiv conversion tool from LaTeX to HTML; here is a sentence from the abstract:

"corpus-scale conversion work aimed at 90% error-free HTML (currently 75%)"

although there may be issues that I do not understand or did not see (I looked at the paper very quickly) that make it more difficult for the authors than for the simplest possible translation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com