mailing-list for TeXmacs Users

[Joris van der Hoeven <address@hidden>]

On Wed, 12 Jun 2002, David Allouche wrote:

> Obviously, TeXmacs has little hope of succeeding as a replacement for 
> TeX, simply because people who use TeX do not want to replace it, and 
> people who do not use TeX still find TeXmacs too difficult to use.

Your analysis astonishes me: I know several people who used LaTeX before
and switched to TeXmacs, because they find TeXmacs very easy to use.
These people are *not* computer scientists, but mathematicians,
with poor knowledge of computer science.

> I agree that the existing user documentation *is* hard to read and 
> understand, but it looks like the people that Joris know find it easy. So 
> there is little hope there unless someone else make a complete rewrite.

That again is a matter of taste. Certain people find the documentation
very straight and therefore useful; others will prefer a nice tutorial
with lots of examples. I think that we just have to wait for other people
who are willing to write documentation, and such people will probably
show up one day.

> Repeat after me: let LaTeX user use LaTeX, let Word users use StarOffice, 
> we can do what they do better than them (well, almost), but we will 
> prevail because we will do what no other free software is doing 
> satisfyingly by any standard: WYSIWYG edition of structured documents, 
> not WYSIWYG edition of TeX-like documents or high-quality word 
> processing. So XML is THE must.

Well, since you want to do the XML, fine, but this does not mean that
other usages of TeXmacs than the ones that you have in mind are bad
or uninteresting.

> About the spacing, I agree that TeXmacs clearly still has problem with 
> that. For example, try to make a document title over several lines. For 
> the center alignement to be correct you need to create two "title" 
> environments, but then, there is no spacing between their ink boxes. That 
> can be fixed by adding a "small space after". Idem for the eqnarray* 
> problem described by Phil. That is easy to fix, but that should not even 
> appear in the first place.

Yes, there are still a few problems, but they will be fixed
when I have time.

> Moreover, TeXmacs have default margins which noticeably narrower than the 
> margin in, say, article documentclass in LaTeX.

That is right; in fact I rather use TeXmacs with 11pt or 12pt myself and
in that case the margins are fine. Otherwise, they should probably
be a bit smaller, but this can be easily fixed when I have time.

> One other thing where spacing sucks is with the positioning of section 
> titles. LaTeX place chapter titles (in book style) at the right postion, 
> which is NOT the top of the page body, but much lower. The correct 
> position is determined by a complicated geometric method (shown in any 
> good typesetting book) which takes in account the page size, and the end 
> result is that the title is placed where the eyes naturally goes *at 
> first*. I have not noticed such a sophistication in the TeXmacs styles 
> yet.

This can be fixed quite easily when I have time.

> Michael John Downes says whitespacing is a compromise between readability 
> and cost of paper. I absolutely do not agree. Whitespace is here to 
> improve readability. Full stop. If you want to save on paper, okay, but 
> then do not pretend you are doing high quality typography. The point is 
> not that too much whitespace costs more paper, but that too much 
> whitespace *reduces* readability.
> 
> Also Joris seems to say there is a way to customize the minimal 
> horizontal distance between ascents and descent to allow skyline fitting. 
> What is it?

The "horizontal ink separation" environment variable.

<Joris>