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Re: [TeXmacs] TeXmacs name


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  • From: Alvaro Tejero Cantero <address@hidden>
  • To: address@hidden
  • Subject: Re: [TeXmacs] TeXmacs name
  • Date: Fri, 11 Dec 2009 09:13:18 +0100
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Dear Madhusudan,

I am afraid you're wrong.

> I think that TeXmacs is almost the perfect name for the program.

Yes if the target is to confuse everybody.

It has TeX
> support,

Wrong. It exports (not 1:1) to LaTeX, runs BibTeX for the bibliography
and can use TeX fonts. Employing TeX in the name triggers the wrong
expectations - you seem yourself not to have understood what the
program does alone from the name... Once more: TeXmacs has its own
typesetter. It does not run TeX for positioning boxes.

> and is almost as versatile as Emacs.

for many people (especially the target group of TeXmacs) the
association upon hearing "Emacs" is to a horribly complicated program,
that requires learning arcane keybindings even for the most basic
operations, that uses a weird terminology and that sports a cryptic
and nonstandard interface.

N.B. I am a happy user of Emacs myself, I am here just portraying a
very common reaction independently of whether it does justice to
Emacs.

If you'd like to underline the programmable aspect of the editor, I
don't think this is of interest to users that don't know yet the
program. A really important property of TeXmacs however is that it
treats the document as an structured tree which can be modified live.

I would have perhaps preferred
> something like SciTeXWriter (or SciTeXmaster, given that it is more than
> just a writer), but TeXmacs does nicely.

No mumble-jumble of amputated words can do justice to a reasonably
featureful piece of software. Following that rule one could call Paris
SeinEiffCoeursées.

> Your other proposed name is obscure sounding, and if anything,

_Your_ name sounds obscure to me. I hope you understand that this is a
relative perception and that you cannot fully satisfy a global
audience. You just need something unique enough and to dispense with
the need for denotation (you can still use connotation). Quipu would
become familiar as well as any other name; surely we will receive
other good suggestions.

does not
> convey anything about the functionality of the program to the potential
> userbase.

The current one gets the wrong message across.

> Name changes are usually fraught with confusion, and unless there
> is a really massive upside, best not done.

The upcoming release of a QT-based version is exactly the opportunity.
TeXmacs is massively undermarketed in regard to what is capable of
doing.

Best regards,

Álvaro.

> With regards.
>
> On Wed, Dec 9, 2009 at 12:09 AM, Gubinelli Massimiliano
> <address@hidden> wrote:
>>
>> (almost crossposting from address@hidden)
>> Dear all,
>>  I would like to revive once more the debate on the name for the
>> TeXmacs program. There are many reasons for believing that the current
>> name does not serve very well the popularity of the program. I've just
>> come across to another possibility (among many other already proposed
>> and lost somewhere in the internet):
>> *  Quipu (or kipu, or khipu) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quipu).
>> Apparently this is the ancient way Incas had to keep various kind
>> of  informations and seems to mean "knot" so there is some link with
>> mathematics and with structured information. The images of Quipus make
>> me think to trees (of TeXmacs tags).
>>
>> Here en excerpt of the wikipedia page (nice and worth reading)
>>
>> "
>> Most of the information recorded on the quipus consists of numbers in
>> a decimal system;[1] see The encoding system below.
>> Some of the knots, as well as other features such as color, are
>> thought to represent non-numeric information, which has not been
>> deciphered. It is generally thought that the system did not include
>> phonetic symbols analogous to letters of the alphabet. However Gary
>> Urton has suggested that the quipus used a binary system which could
>> record phonological or logographicdata.
>> "
>>
>> Another possible name :
>> * Tiamat (Tiamat is another mathematical authoring tool)
>> which has the benefit to allow to conserve the extension .tm
>> Best,
>> Massimiliano
>> ps: thanks to Martin for correcting my previous post on texmacs-dev.
>

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