mailing-list for TeXmacs Users

[M Singh <address@hidden>]

On Wednesday 09 February 2005 12:20, Henri Lesourd wrote:

>
> >Have you ever had to deal with Professors set in their ways ?
>
> Yes. But you cannot say that professors are all 'set in their way'. They

No. But a very large fraction of them do not consider the choice of an editor 
the central focus of their lives. Being in academia involves hunting for 
funds, hiring good students, overseeing their work, and making sure that the 
work gets properly reported in reputable journals/conferences.

Any editor/markup system that :

1. Works well and is easy enough to learn (something that texmacs, LaTeX and 
M$ Word all satisfy to varying person-dependent degrees).
2. Is used for most applications that the person is likely to use.

is the one adopted.

> can change their
> minds, especially if you show them an easier and more interesting
> alternative.

I daresay that working with an editor that is not acceptable for any journal 
/ 
conference / proposal counts as "interesting", but I would very much doubt 
that it would be classified as "easier".

>
> >Why would anyone want to use texmacs, excellently designed as it is, when
> >almost every journal/conference that I am aware of uses LaTeX / Word (a
> > few wordperfect friendly organizations are still out there, but they are
> > a dying breed).
>
> Writing academic papers is not **at all** the only possible uses of
> TeXmacs (fortunately !).

We were talking about Professors, advisors, grad students, etc., weren't we ? 
I doubt that we were talking about the editor that a Professor might use to 
draw up his weekly shopping list :)

>
> >I do not wish to restart an argument that was settled in one way a long
> > time ago, but until .tm format becomes widely accepted in major journals/
> > at major conferences, texmacs, for all its simplicity and elegance, will
> > not be a tool of choice for anyone.
>
> What you say doesn't appropriately reflects reality. As I said above,
> writing papers for journals is
> not at all the only possible use of TeXmacs.

But it is the single biggest determinant for selection for any advisor / 
Professor worth his/her salt.

People in general do not like to get used to a multitude of tools. They 
usually want *one* tool that is usable for a all / most of their needs. It is 
very academic (pun intended) to talk about an advisor in an academic setting 
who would select an editor based on something extraneous to his/her work. I 
have known professors who use Word for everything, and a smaller number that 
use LaTeX for everything. But none that keep shifting between editors. As I 
mentioned, people in academics usually have much bigger things to consider 
than an editor.

I like to play with texmacs so as to keep myself used to it, on an offchance 
that one day it might support full interoperability with LaTeX (or even 
Word).

>
> >This is not a flame, just a recognition of hard reality. I use texmacs for
> >writing short group reports that are meant for internal circulation, but
> > when it is time to submit a paper or do any other stuff that involves
> > co-authors, it is back to LaTeX / Word again.
>
> Yes, but as far as convincing journals to accept the TeXmacs format is
> concerned, you can :
>
> a) Go and see the people in these journals, and convince them. It is
> difficult to succeed, because
>      in itself, the fact that TeXmacs is a better tool for writing
> papers is not a real incentive for
>      them : journals are interested in --publishing-- papers, that is
> not the same ;

Correct. And I have tried. On one occasion, a very miffed secretary asked me 
a 
simple question  - "Can't you simply export to LaTeX or Word ?". I had posed 
that question on this mailing list prior to that experience myself, and had 
been told in no uncertain terms (putting it mildly) that I was being 
unappreciative of the effort put into developing texmacs. 

All noting that, ordinarily, the objective of any potential author is to get 
published. Not to reform the typesetting practices of any organization.

>
> b) Go and convince the --users-- to use TeXmacs. This is easier, because
> from the point of view
>      of the users, using a better tool --is-- an incentive. And at some
> point in the future, the fact that
>      lots of users use a given tool unavoidably becomes a strong
> incentive for journals.

I wish you the best of  luck, but I think you are involved in a 
chicken-and-egg story here :

1. Would journals change their practices because of heavy user demand (one 
would naively think yes) ?

2. Would a lot of users (academic users mind you) switch to texmacs knowing 
fully well that no major journals / conferences / funding organizations 
support it ?

>
> As such, from a very academia-centric point of view, you are right when
> you say that the journals
> play an important role. But they are not the only possible actors ; thus
> the way you present the situation
> is misleading, all the more because it tends to divert people from
> trying to widen the user base, which is

My interlocutor was clearly speaking of an academic setting. And to speak of 
something other than technical publishing when speaking of academia is a 
little like speaking of hypothetical Frenchmen who do not understand French. 
Irrelevant, in other terms.

> the most effective approach for success. Using a software is like
> standards ; even if it seems to be so, it
> is not something that can ultimately be decided by a small minority of
> people.


Precisely. Which is why co-opting a larger user base by providing them with 
efficient interoperability with the tools that are standards would be the 
strategic way to enter the two-player (LaTeX and Word) market. But that is a 
losing argument on this mailing list.