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Two problems of TeXmacs (IMHO)


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  • From: Javier Arántegui Jiménez <address@hidden>
  • To: address@hidden
  • Subject: Two problems of TeXmacs (IMHO)
  • Date: Wed, 17 Dec 2003 13:41:03 +0100
Hello!

In my opinion, one of the weakest points of TeXmacs is that the help files
are
sometimes difficult to understand (at least for me). A few days ago, I gave
up and I have spent a couple of evenings learning LaTeX. I used "A (Not So)
Short Introduction to LaTeX2e" <http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/info/lshort/>
as textbook. Likely I will forget LaTeX in some weeks because I like much
more TeXmacs but I think I understand better TeXmacs now.

Maybe the best way to learn (and master) TeXmacs for a new user who has not
worked with LaTeX is the following:

1. Read "A (Not So) Short Introduction to LaTeX2e" (or another introductory
text to LaTeX) and practise a little.
2. Read the TeXmacs tutorial
<http://www.texmacs.org/tmweb/help/tutorial.en.html>.
3. Learn how to do the things you did using LaTeX in TeXmacs.
4. Forget LaTeX.

You need to know Latex mainly because the GUI has been thought for and by
Latex users. Maybe the learning of Latex had to be explicity suggested: "To
master TeXmacs you must learn LaTeX first".


Again in my opinion, the second problem of TeXmacs is its name. The last week
I spent 20 minutes explaining that TeXmacs was not a Latex WYSIWYG editor
based on emacs. I think that TeXmacs is a very confusing name. Sometimes
Latex and Emacs users misunderstand what TeXmacs is. This is making difficult
to increase the number of new users.

Maybe it is time to rename the project (or maybe not and I am wrong). Some
projects have changed its name without problems. For example, Ktexmaker2 (a
Latex editor for KDE) was renamed to Kile. Or, Phoenix (a browser based on
Mozilla) was renamed as Firebird to avoid the confusion between it and the
BIOS manufacturer.

Javier


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