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Re: [TeXmacs] Two problems of TeXmacs (IMHO)


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  • From: David Allouche <address@hidden>
  • To: address@hidden
  • Subject: Re: [TeXmacs] Two problems of TeXmacs (IMHO)
  • Date: Wed, 17 Dec 2003 15:11:07 +0100
On Wed, Dec 17, 2003 at 01:41:03PM +0100, Javier Ar?ntegui Jim?nez wrote:
[...]
> 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".

That would undermine the very goal of TeXmacs as a structured
typesetting editor (compare to TeXmacs as a CAS interface system).
The "official" TeXmacs position is that, for what TeXmacs does, LaTeX is
obsolete and irrelevant except for interoperability, and for what
TeXmacs not yet does, LaTeX is obsolete and bound to irrelevance. Call
that arrogant, megalomaniac, irrealistic if you want, but that is the
basic idea.

Now that the goals are set, the question is how these goals are best
achieved. Some perennial problems in my opinion is indeed the
inadequateness of the GUI and the lack no-nonsense documentation for
newcomers.

The GUI used to be worse than it is now. Hopefully things will get
better after the internals have been fixed and when someone will be
writing a GTK (or something) based GUI, so TeXmacs will be able to use
things like dialogs, panels, etc. But one persistent problem is that
Joris simply is a bad GUI designer. I remember having insane discussions
when trying to fix the menu hierarchy about issues which are standard
practice to everyone with a clue about GUI design, like not having menu
items which appear and disappear depending on the context and w/o
visible feedback. BTW, this proposal was rejected and this "feature" is
still present today.

Another problem is that the design of TeXmacs historically mimicked
LaTeX. It has diverged more and more over time, but a lot of
latex-inspired naming rests, leading to aberrations such as "in
formulas, formula style is off by default". Since changes in the GUI
texts are frowned upon because they break the translations and might
confuse old users, there is little motivation to clean up this kind of
things.

About the documentation, the problem rather is that a lot of things are
implied because there are common sense to latex users. For example, in
my last week's work on the documentation I added a section explaining when
should "formula", "equation" and "equations" menu items be used and how
the influence the display of indices and limits (not yet online because
Savannah is down). That information being missing was clearly related to
the "how to I display limits under?" FAQ.

Fixing the documentation, though, is easier, Joris is quite liberal with
write access on the documentation CVS. You just need time, dedication
and some writing skills to improve the situation. Help has been welcome
in this field for monthes. Several translations of the documentation
have been contributed, but very little to the documentation contents.


> 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.

I agree 100%. The "TeXmacs" name is worst name one could have come up
with. Whenever you present it you just have to spend 15 mins explaining
it is neither TeX nor Emacs and that yes, the name is crap. However,
some people seem convinced it as already achieved universal fame and
that changing the name would only cause a loss of visibility.

The last name I came up with in my never-ending search is "Tiem". It
just stands for "TM", which is the acronym used internally everywhere in
texmacs. You could also consider "lead" (as a reference to the founding
material, pun intended, of typography) or "gnupress", or "oint" or
whatever.

--
-- ddaa

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