mailing-list for TeXmacs Users

[Henri Lesourd <address@hidden>]

> > 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.
Right, but it is the same for anything that is not directly related to 
your job,
in any kind of context. The point is : a sufficiently large fraction of 
them can
consider the choice of an editor as something important, spend time on it,
and then incite others to do the same.

Also, as soon as an editor (as any other kind of tool) becomes a really
good tool for you, then you start saving (potentially a lot of) time. So 
even
if the choice of your tools is not the central point of your life, it 
can be a very
good bet to spend time on it (I mean : spend time on solving the technical
problems).

> 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.
Well seen.

> 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).
>
> [...]
>
> I have tried. On one occasion, a very miffed secretary asked me a 
> simple question  - "Can't you simply export to LaTeX or Word ?".
**Miffed** ? Excuse me, but the logic is reversed, here ! After all, we
are those who write the papers, we should not be mandated to use only
two formats, which are far from perfect.

I would like to remind you, also, that most of the time, researchers are
also mandated to accept that the copyright on their papers goes to the
publishers, with very few consideration (among other things) for their
mission of contributing to the publicly available knowledge.

So there are some reasons to consider that those who should make more
efforts are the publishers, not the people who write the papers. But of 
course,
if everybody takes the current situation for granted, it will never change.

(In saying this, I consider the fact that, as you say, you tried, and I 
don't
say that it is easy. The only problem (which appears clearly all along your
mail) is that it appears to be quite difficult to avoid the "I do my 
work/I have
no time for the rest" mentality, and quite easy to forget that after 
all, we are
the **clients** of these publishers, and not the opposite !).

> 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. 
>  
As for me, I was not here, then. I can just say that currently, the LaTeX
export does 80% of the job, and that it has probably been a nonnegligible
task to move it where it is now.

> All noting that, ordinarily, the objective of any potential author is to get 
> published. Not to reform the typesetting practices of any organization.
>  
As I said above, different opinions can exist, in this area :-)

> 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 ?
They would do it because other people (possibly co-authors) would
use TeXmacs for other kinds of documents, and because themselves
are using it for the same kinds of reasons. And as far as major
journal/conferences, etc. are concerned, I know people which
currently use TeXmacs to write papers.

There are conferences which only ask for a PS/PDF file, and also,
it is not *at all* impossible to write first your document using TeXmacs,
then export it to LaTeX and then correct / polish it using the LaTeX
source (it can even be more efficient that way).

> 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.
In fact, I agree with you that there is a real problem with the
TeXmacs->LaTeX translation, because there are so much
things to take into account to build a translator which works
for everybody. So I guess that what people do most of the
time is write simple scripts/emacs macros, etc. that, in the
context of a particular paper, are used to translate the TeXmac's
LaTeX output into a better LaTeX.

It would be great if each time someone has to translate a TeXmacs
paper in LaTeX, she would improve the TeXmacs->LaTeX translator
and send a patch, instead of writing an ad-hoc script.

This approach is the only one I can see that could **really** help
to start solving this problem.

Because otherwise, to state it frankly, to expect that by
some magic, some people who don't need it would nevertheless
start working on a good TeXmacs -> LaTeX translator is a
little bit like, I would say, expecting to find an hypothetical fish
who would understand how to fly, or an hypothetical bird who
would understand how to swim : such animals exist, but you
don't see them very often 8-)