mailing-list for TeXmacs Users

[Henri Lesourd <address@hidden>]

el.douwen wrote:

> hi everybody
>
> on the geogebra forum i am discussing with a colleague who seems a bit 
> scpetic with texmacs
>
> he says:
>
> Dans ce cas là je n'ai pas encore les compétences nécessaires pour 
> t'aider, effectivement. 
> ---
> Nut i was asking him if he could write a program (plugin ?) to insert 
> dynamic geogebra figures in texmacs doucments; he says no
This of course you cant do it, for one cannot run Java
applets nor flash inside TeXmacs.

> <>En attendant, le LaTeX WYSIWYG c'est assez paradoxal, et finalement 
> tu as juste l'air de dire que ça ressemble à de l'éditeur de formule 
> OO.o ou MS Office, au final.
> ---
> latex wyswyg that seems to be paradoxal; is it just like Ooo equation 
> editor ?
No its much more, e.g. it's the only editor I know which can
be used to edit markup and *in the same time* be wysiwyg, when
most convenient.

Did you ever tried to edit a big LaTeX table ? It's a hassle,
while in TeXmacs, its simply wysiwyg, ultra fast editing.

> <>Le LaTeX est quand même fait pour des gros documents, même si les 
> petits ne le gênent pas. Tu as fait combien de pages maximum avec 
> TeXmacs ? Rarement la centaine j'imagine. LaTeX seul ça ne lui posera 
> pas de problème, j'attends les tests pour TeXmacs (en temps de 
> génération, bien entendu).

Utter BS. LaTeX is the only editing system I know where you
need to actually *debug* the typesetting of your documents.

As far as the efficiency argument is concerned, with a big
document, you suffer anyway with LaTeX.

> latex is made for big documents.

Really, this "made for big documents" concept means nothing: as
soon as your machine is sufficiently powerful and your software
sufficiently bug-free, there are always ways to cope with these
speed problems.

> Can you manipulate 100 pages docuemnts with texmacs ? i dont think so
Matter of fact, the typesetting can become slow with around 100
pages. But if you measure the time of *one* typesetting, TeXmacs
typesetting algorithms are anyway much faster. Ya pas photo.

Thus the difference lies in the usage patterns of the respective
software: and in this respect, if you take into account the *whole*
toolchain, from typing the content to tuning the final appearance,
it's crystal clear that one can author mathematical documents much
faster in TeXmacs than in LaTeX, without compromising on quality.

> for the last point i dont know what to answer him

Anyway, the easy solution of cutting your document in smaller
pieces of not more than 60-100 pages works very well. Even if
your editor is very powerful, you would do it.