mailing-list for TeXmacs Users

[Kris Kuhlman <address@hidden>]

Mark Arrasmith wrote:

> Don't know if this was answered after the long discussion about TeXmacs vs 
> LaTeX vs MS Word.  
I exported the TeXmacs file to LaTeX, then I simplified some of the 
output, and converted it using latex2rtf (which is quite free) and it 
seems to work fine. My advisor didn't complain about it, he said it 
worked fine for him.

The latex2rtf converter complained about many of the things TeXmacs did; 
colors for example. When I am writing, I will often change the color of 
some text, so I remember to go back and check it, etc. when I do check 
it, I change it back to black, but there were color definitions (with 
nothing in them) left in the body of the LaTeX output. After vacuuming 
out this extra stuff (the converter complained about colors it couldn't 
handle), and I changed the bullets and numbered lists over to vanilla 
LaTeX ones, then no more complaints from the converter (no graphics).

After the dialog which went back & forth regarding the conversion from 
TeXmacs to OpenOffice, part of me thought I should look for another 
editor. I like TeXmacs, because it looks great (but LaTeX does too), and 
it is easy to type equations. It advertises that it handles text editing 
like emacs, but text navigation in TeXmacs isn't enough like emacs.  
Some of the navigation features that I have become accustomed to are 
missing: nav by word, delete by word, transpose letters & words, and the 
worst... cursor movement where a line wraps (when I first discovered 
this I seriously thought this was a misconfigured keyboard or something, 
I think it is a big pain). I saw in another discussion that improving 
cursor movement was on the list of things to do, I think this is very 
important.

I think TeXmacs is great, and want to keep using it. I am also the only 
person in my department that uses it; I have tried showing it to other 
people (who are impressed by the looks of output), but after they 
install it they (in windows), they stopped using it because just moving 
around in it, to do simple editing is non-standard and non-intuitive. 
Not to say that TeXmacs should handle like MS-Word (shudder).

If there is some way to customize TeXmacs to make it do some of these 
navigational things, I would try, but from what I have read it doesn't 
appear to be.

Kris