mailing-list for TeXmacs Users

[M Singh <address@hidden>]

On Wednesday 09 February 2005 18:44, Henri Lesourd wrote:
> >>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.

I beg to disagree. The editor/typesetting system is seen as a tool towards an 
end, and not an end in itself.

If it is incompatible with the tasks they have to accomplish, most sensible 
people (and I am obviously not including myself in that list :)) ditch the 
tool in question, pick up a better one and get on the with the work. The work 
is important, not how you got it done.

>
> 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).
>

Of course. But what if the problem is that the o/p of that excellent tool is 
not acceptable to people who figuratively provide you with livelihood ?

> >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.

Of course it is reversed. And the reason for that is not purely technical but 
a little akin to the law of demand and supply. There are a limited number of 
papers that can get published in any given issue of a journal, and a nearly 
unlimited number of good manuscripts that merit publication. If you give the 
editors too much grief, they are going to pick up a manuscript from your 
competitors and leave you in the limbo, waiting for the next issue.


>
> 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 !).
>


True. But what I am speaking about is reality, not some utopia where things 
ought to be different (and I agree with you on the conception of that 
utopia).


> >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.

I accept that and commend the developers for putting in so much effort. And 
would gladly wait for a future version of texmacs that could work completely 
seamlessly (read in .cls and .sty files, produce texmacs templates on the 
fly, and then export into latex at the end of it all, without any serious 
need for hand editing the result) but that is not going to happen.

For all that effort to count for something, the above is needed if texmacs is 
to acquire a seriously large technical user base.

>
> >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 :-)

Only that I share that opinion, while realizing that the reality does not 
comport with that opinion, and is not likely to, for a fairly long time to 
come, if ever.


> 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.

Noted.

> > 
> 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).

Then you basically have to know two tools - texmacs and LaTeX. How would you 
feel if to export to PDF from any tool (LaTeX / Word / wordstar (??) / 
whatever ...) you had to understand the Adobe PDF specification and commands 
therein ?

Similar comments regarding PostScript.

>
> >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.

Excellent. Except that everytime the same journal comes out with a new .cls 
file, the task of writing that template has to be done all over again.

>
> 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.

I agree with that totally.

>
> 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-)

But such are the usual thoughts of a person who just wants to communicate the 
results of his research, and not make the choice of editors and their myriad 
interactions the subject of his research instead. Such creatues not only 
exist, but thrive in the academic world in great numbers and overwhelming 
proportions.