mailing-list for TeXmacs Users

[Amir Michail <address@hidden>]

On May 4, 2019, at 8:13 AM, Massimiliano Gubinelli <address@hidden> wrote:

Dear Amir,

 let me comment a bit on your proposal below,

On 3. May 2019, at 21:58, Amir Michail <address@hidden> wrote:

Hello,

I think the following suggestions could make TeXmacs a lot more popular:

* promote TeXmacs as a note taking tool that is useful even if you don't need to generate high quality PDFs and/or print anything out

why do you think this would make TeXmacs popular? as a note taking tool it can be compared to many applications one has on tablets, which allow to take handwritten notes (many colleagues of mine do this). Why TeXmacs will be preferred to them? Personally, I can take notes on TeXmacs, mostly because the mathematical typesetting and input is so great. But I do not know of many TeXmacs users which already do this. I think is an interesting discussion to see which are the best uses for TeXmacs.

A lot more people need to write notes than generate high quality PDFs and/or print out stuff.

Also, most people don’t need to write heavy mathematics and so would rather type than handwrite their notes.

I suspect many people would love the high quality typesetting of TeXmacs while writing notes even if the result is not WYSIWYG with respect to a fixed page size.

Fixed page sizes are less important nowadays since people tend to view documents in resizable windows on their computers rather than print them out.

* add a mode where word wrapping occurs at the window edge; this allows you to more easily use a narrow TeXmacs window to take notes while using another app to its side

This indeed cannot be done easily  right now because go against WYSIWYG, there is a papirus mode which does not constrain the writing to a physical page, but we do not have any way to constrain the writing to the window size. 

However I think this goes really in a direction for which TeXmacs is not designed to go. It would be interesting to discuss if we want to do it or not.

100% WYSIWYG should not take priority over usability. Also, see my comment above about fixed page sizes being less important nowadays.

* include a compact layout for taking notes that minimizes white space

this should be doable right now. maybe somebody could give a try to write such a style file.

* add a dark mode

also this should be doable, just change the color of the page and the color of the text. “Dark mode” goes against WYSIWYG again. But maybe one should more think of it as some kind of “blackboard” setting, like for beamer presentations, not meant to be used in printing. 

I agree that, as "blackboard mode”, is could fit well with the idea of “note taking” or “brainstorming” for some mathematical problem one is working on (or similar exploratory note taking workflow)

* make it more difficult to accidentally nest environments in unexpected and hard to correct ways

This is indeed an issue: many unexperienced TeXmacs users (e.g. my students) leave a lot of garbage in their TeXmacs files because essentially they are not aware of many environments they create accidentally. This poses a lot of problems in LaTeX exporting, for example. Maybe it would be good to have some kind of “Lint” tool for TeXmacs which could highlights problems like empty environments or math outside math environments, which are not strictly errors but maybe likely unintended behavior.

* make sure copy/paste from TeXmacs to other apps just works and gives reasonable results

This should be the case, if not maybe you can file a bug. What specific situation are you thinking to?

I originally tried to write this post by copy/paste from a TeXmacs window into Mail on macOS but it didn’t work as expected. It embedded some sort of object instead.

Amir

What do you think?

I’m not really sure that “note taking” is such an important reason that would boost TeXmacs’ popularity. I still see adoption slowed by people saying that “LaTeX” is enough. So more a psycological barrier.

best

Max

Amir

P.S. A more popular TeXmacs could mean a more stable app due to the greater number of bug reports and developers interested in fixing them.