mailing-list for TeXmacs Users

[Joris van der Hoeven <address@hidden>]

Thank you Mark and Kris for writing down your experiences.

Andreas: what about creating a FAQ entry for this?

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On Mon, 14 Feb 2005, Kris Kuhlman wrote:
> 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
>