GiovanniP

On the "import from LaTeX" Joris van der Hoeven advanced the argument that the impossibility of writing a general import file from LaTeX allows LaTeX to maintain its status as the main document preparation system for scientific articles. In fact, if you could import arbitrary LaTeX, an user of a different system could collaborate with LaTeX users (probably a form of "conservative conversion" would be necessary for back and forth translation between document formats).

> does pretty poorly at importing LaTeX

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 ;-)

It will take a bit.

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.

> We need an open source alternative to https://www.princexml.com/samples/

TeXmacs: https://www.texmacs.org

As far as I know e.g. this book https://www.editions-ellipses.fr/accueil/4856-le-petit-pytho... has been written with TeXmacs, and antoher is in preparation by the same author. Also, Joris van der Hoeven has written a guide to TeXmacs ("The Jolly Writer") using TeXmacs

I got curious, downloaded the source, compiled with LaTeX and, separately, imported the source file in TeXmacs.

Perhaps there are a few points in which TeXmacs' import can be improved immediately (other things seem a bit more complex). I wrote a post at http://forum.texmacs.cn/t/latex-import-hacker-news-example/4...

One thing that makes a small part of the import not work is that in the LaTeX source some of the macros are defined after the start of the document, and TeXmacs sees them too late to take them into account when formatting the title.

Said this, TeXmacs finds the references, and LaTeX does not (I do not find the bibliography file, which is named "bibliography") ... how is this possible?

Another good reason IMO (3) another implementation of the conversion may be a useful reference/point of comparison

https://www.mathcha.io/editor is closer to the idea of TeXmacs (editing the typeset document, not the source)

The export filter allows one to work in my opinion (I used it a bit, I picked up feelings from discussions of others). The import filter is limited (I have read that any LaTeX import filter is limited because of LaTeX's grammar), and in my judgment of this moment (that is, with very limited experience) it may work only if the people you are collaborating with "collaborate", keeping within the set of LaTeX expressions that TeXmacs recognizes. There is work which may be helpful: https://www.texmacs.org/joris/latexconv/latexconv.pdf but I do not know its current status and may not be relevant if people that write LaTeX code use syntax (e.g. a package) that the TeXmacs import filter does not support. By the way, on the topic of using TeXmacs for one's work, I picked from someone the following suggestion: presentations, they usually do not require collaboration.

There is always the possibility to switch to source; there is a menu item in the editor (Document->Source->Edit source tree), and when examining source the editor becomes a structure editor (this enforces syntax as far as I understand).

The previous version was 1.99.21 :-)

2.1 does not introduce new features with respect to 1.99.21, the software has been gradually refined with new features and bug fixes along the whole 1.99.x series of releases I think (I am following it starting from about 1.99.9).

Important features of 2.1 are a much improved LaTeX export filter, improved HTML export, a comment facility (for collaboration), improvements on plugin support for several programming languages (I did not test these extensively), a very nice mechanism for making it easier to use the label/ref mechanism (includes a tiptool for immediately seeing the referenced object).

TeXmacs (https://www.texmacs.org/), which is a document preparation system, may be taken into consideration as a word processor too; its main editing mode is WYSIWYG and its operation by default can be menu-driven.

Try TeXmacs (www.texmacs.org), which, despite the name would make one think that it descends from TeX and Emacs, is related to TeX only for the typographical quality and to Emacs for the extensibility. It has the ease of use of a word processor and it is controllable through an own native macro system and Scheme Lisp.

For the readability of HTML exported by TeXmacs, please take a look yourself at the html files in https://github.com/texmacs/notes/tree/main/docs I think that the developers would be happy to hear any comment on that topic. I am not able to answer your other questions, I hope someone else will answer them.

Please see http://forum.texmacs.cn/t/does-the-r-plugin-work/434/2 (you maybe have figured it out on your own). I tried the solution with R_LIBS_USER=~/.local/lib/R, and despite still an error being present it is possible to enter commands and see the output. Plots are displayed in own windows, but it may be that with simple programming they may be embedded in the document too.

Edit: in the same thread one can read how to embed plots generated with R in the TeXmacs document. So my impression is that there is sufficient functionality for working.

According to Joris van der Hoeven "... it has become clear over time that this choice of name was one of the biggest mistakes of the project. Indeed, the name incorrectly suggests that TeXmacs is some kind of interface to (La)TeX."

> I think a happy medium would be if you could export snippets of latex from a larger texmacs doc but I haven't actually tried it.

In the TeXmacs editor Edit->Copy to->LaTeX (one might have to add some macro definitions in the preamble of the LaTeX document)

> I just ignore the entire TeX-Editor landscape

TeXmacs is not a TeX-editor, it is an independent program. The word "TeX" is in the name because one of the ambitions of the program is to inherit the typographic excellence of TeX (see the "parent article"). On this topic, the author of TeXmacs claims he has surpassed it.

I have tried it now on Xubuntu 20.10 and there is a bug. I have asked here if anyone knows how to fix it: http://forum.texmacs.cn/t/does-the-r-plugin-work/434

Perhaps a support software to guide the writing of both the TeXmacs and the LaTeX versions of a document so that conversion is straightforward, and therefore easier to make it readable for the converter, might be useful (see discussion at http://forum.texmacs.cn/t/an-idea-for-collaborative-work-wit...). For what regards the journal style files, as far as I know they are being refined in TeXmacs---my feeling is that a comprehensive set will be reached only through user contributions.

After this post, the developers became aware that there is an open issue for that and responded at https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1828124

I hope that will help to bring the development forward.

In case, for Linux I am using their static binary, if I recall correctly the Ubuntu package wanted to change my Guile to 1.8 and this wasn't ok for me. I have learnt today that Fedora has it in the repositories. The Windows installer works and as far as I know the one for Mac OS too.

In addition to the ones I have already given, here is another source of information about TeXmacs: https://texmacs.github.io/notes/docs/main.html

I agree that some communication from the TeXmacs developers to the Fedora ones would be helpful (I documented myself, Fedora is using Guile 2 and still supporting 1.8 with a compatibility package). (More about the Scheme in TeXmacs later). Said this, I think the angle from which you are looking at the software is too narrow. A better angle is to look at the realized potential of the TeXmacs document preparation system: it does everything one could wish for. With "everything" I am exaggerating a little :-)

More in detail (I refer to [1] for a complete discussion):

1) It makes structured editing possible (and that is its main mode of operation). So if you want to mark your text with "semantic" markup you can do that, and in fact that is what using the software leads you to do.

2) It is controllable via programs

3) It has advanced typography (including mathematical formulae at the necessary level for professional mathematicians, as far as I can see), and it is pleasant and easy to work with: you can concentrate on writing, letting the program take care of the visual appearance and you do not need to interpret the sources while you are editing, to figure out where is the text that you want to edit

4) It has user-definable keyboard shortcuts that further help entering structured text

... and I feel it is enough for a short list of the features.

Back to Scheme. The development team is debating on which Scheme to use for the future of TeXmacs, and the debate is taking time. Here are some experiments [2],[3]. The current software (with Guile 1.8) works smoothly, with full functionality. For Linux installation, I chose the static binary they provide ... because on Ubuntu I don't have Guile 1.8 ;-)

[1] http://cahiers.gutenberg.eu.org/cg-bin/article/CG_2001___39-...

[2] https://github.com/mgubi/texmacs/tree/guile3

[3] https://github.com/mgubi/texmacs/tree/s7

> I think that we desperately need some modern language for document preparation

See my comment below https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26498409 :-)

Take a look at TeXmacs (http://www.texmacs.org) (does not share code with TeX, only the name recalls it!). It is at the same time structured and WYSIWYG (having accessible text source), completely programmable (user-defined native macros and Scheme) and has a high quality typography (includes a global page-breaking algorithm). There is a helpful mailing list (info at http://texmacs.org/tmweb/home/ml.en.html) and a forum (http://forum.texmacs.cn/).

TeXmacs can export formulae in MathJax format--there is a setting for that; I have been able to copy formulae to the clipboard (using right-click -> Copy to Clipboard, not by selecting) obtaining what seemed to me the correct LaTeX code. I do not know what is the standard for copying MathJax; I have see this thread of November 2019 (https://github.com/mathjax/MathJax/issues/2240) where someone states that " MathJax output can't be copied directly from the page in version 3", so perhaps the copying of the output with the right click menu is the standard now. TeXmacs can also export to MathML, I tested it and the output was not satisfactory there.

It can be configured to.

For interested people: there is at the moment a proposal for a StackExchange website https://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/121978/texmacs

Especially upvotes to questions are important, as enough people have joined to pass the first stage, but not enough questions have been upvoted.

Let's add also: as a software system (that is independent from TeX), TeXmacs is programmable on its own (using Scheme). Of course if you want to add functionalities to LyX you have to do it in the LyX way (and possibly in the TeX way).