mailing-list for TeXmacs Users

[Amir Michail <address@hidden>]

On Jun 1, 2019, at 5:37 PM, Frank <address@hidden> wrote:

Dear all,

I second this comment.

And also, if I understand correctly, namely the purpose of an "emergency LaTeX editing mode" is to dupe the bossy advisors of those PhD students (indicated by the phrase "less than a second"), then this seems to be ethically wrong, and implementing such a mode encourages those students to be dishonest, not an appropriate way to deal with the pressure in question. It does not seem rational and reasonable to do so even if it might help the propagation of TeXmacs.

What I recommended would essentially be making fun of academic circles with this sort of social pressure. That might make them change their behavior. At the very least, it will attract more attention to TeXmacs.

Amir

Best wishes,

Le 01/06/2019 à 23:15, Massimiliano Gubinelli a écrit :

Amir,

On 1. Jun 2019, at 20:58, Amir Michail <address@hidden> wrote:

Hello,

It seems there is a lot of social pressure in academia for using LaTeX and avoiding WYSIWYG. I suspect that PhD students are particularly susceptible to this social pressure and would probably appreciate an emergency latex editing mode that can be activated in less than a second and is at least partially functional. It might come in handy during those unexpected advisor visits.

I’m in academia (mathematics) and I do not see any pressure in avoiding WYSIWIG. Simply there is much conservatorism about thinking that LaTeX is the best tool for the job and that usual WYSIWIG tools are not good for mathematics. 

And there is some constraint given by the  fact that editors and preprint servers like arXiv essentially require you to submit your paper in LaTeX. 

Is not clear what should mean an *emergency* latex mode. Just use latex, then. 

I know some mathematicians who use Scientific Workplace for example or LyX. I think people must have some knowledge of TeX/LaTeX but there is surely no obligation to work in it. Actually  I use TeXmacs in  my  everyday work in research, in teaching. I supervise PhD thesis and I give some introduction to TeXmacs to all my master, Ph D or postdoctoral students. I’ve written many academic paper with it as  Joris does and as many of the people working with TeXmacs do (Basile, Gregoire, Miguel). 

One of my student, Marco Furlan, wrote enterely his PhD (and master) thesis  with TeXmacs:

https://tel.archives-ouvertes.fr/tel-01864398/document

With others we wrote papers in TeXmacs and for one reason or another the final composition of the thesis has been done in LaTeX.

Miguel de Benito also wrote his thesis direclty in TeXmacs:

https://mdbenito.aerobaticapp.com/0372_1df83ac9-8582-4a11-83dc-701c2828288d/files/math/phd-thesis-dbdb9f6.pdf

Usually I manage to convince younger collaborators to use TeXmacs, for example the following papers have been written enterely in TeXmacs with a very late  conversion to LaTeX to put them in arXiv:

https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.10814

https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.11253

https://arxiv.org/abs/1812.04422

https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.01700

https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.12014

https://arxiv.org/abs/1807.06825

https://arxiv.org/abs/1708.03118

https://arxiv.org/abs/1610.07886

https://arxiv.org/abs/1502.00157

https://arxiv.org/abs/1508.07764

https://arxiv.org/abs/1508.03877

Most of the papers written by Joris are in TeXmacs: 

http://texmacs.org/joris/main/publs.html

I regularly try to make my colleagues aware of the existence of TeXmacs and apart from the usual response “I’m used to LaTeX so I stick to it”, I do not feel there is really *pressure* to use LaTeX.

So I’m not sure what are you worried about.

Best  regards,

Massimiliano Gubinelli

-- 
Best wishes!
Yours,