vdhoeven

There is another far lest costly thing that we can (should) do and that was long on my wish list (less and less high with the higher resolution screens :)

The idea would be to see words that are "broken" into characters and use a global hyphenation algorithm for optimizing the "breaking".

I agree that having more converters would be nice. But which formats are most urgent? A high school teacher would argue that we should support conversions for Word. Programmers would stress that we support Markdown or Pandoc. GNU hackers would ask us to support Texinfo. Any help is welcome...

I think that this issue was very interesting twenty years ago. With modern high resolution screens, I have to admit that we no longer bother too much...

In the future, we might only use Opentype fonts and use a font like TeX Gyre Pagella as our default font. I am afraid that we need to keep the old (tfm+pfb) Computer Modern as a legacy font so that people can reliably continue to use their old TeXmacs documents (remind that minor microtypographic changes may completely change lines and pages are broken).

It is not my intention to sound aggressive, but just to get things straight. I understand from the original comment that the author likes to use TeXmacs, but that (s)he thinks that the proclaimed incompatibility with LaTeX is too big a drawback for more than occasional use.

Now one has to be fair when making this kind of statements.

First of all: how 'big' is this incompatibility? I think that it is not that big at all and roughly as big as when you use a new style package with LaTeX or when trying to recompile a 25 year old LaTeX file.

Secondly: who is to blame for this incompatibility? TeX/LaTeX was designed to have a Turing complete grammar, which makes it impossible to write 100% reliable converters. The way the comment is stated, it suggests that TeXmacs is not good enough. I think that this is a misrepresentation.

Now it is plausable that the author is not even aware of the implicit bias of the terms 'incompatible with LaTeX' and 'partial converter'. Therefore, my reply might sound aggressive. But if you carefully reread it, then you will understand that it isn't.

I would like to see what kind of documents cannot be imported from LaTeX, because the LaTeX -> TeXmacs converter works correctly or nearly correctly on thousands of documents from ArXiv.

There is also an option for conservative conversions (see Basile's comment below).

The way you phrase 'not compatible with LaTeX' and 'partially supported' suggests that TeXmacs is to blame for this situation. IMHO, TeXmacs does the conversions as well as reasonably possible: you could have said 'LaTeX is incompatible with any other format', which I consider a better assessment of the situation. If you don't agree, then please tell me which other document format is compatible with LaTeX.

See also

https://www.texmacs.org/tmweb/home/news.en.html

Yes, the name choice is indeed unfortunate and one of my biggest regrets concerning TeXmacs.

But it is difficult to change the name now, because that would imply having to redo a lot of documentation, web pages, videos, etc.

Both conversions from and to LaTeX are of top quality.

The conversion from LaTeX into TeXmacs have been tested on a large number of documents downloaded from ArXiv.

The conservative conversion options are experimental, but they can be used in TeXmacs 2.1.

I don't know of any other similarly good converters between LaTeX and another format.