And if so, I think this could be a major part of the marketing for TeXmacs.
Maybe even have side-by-side screenshots showing both TeXmacs and LyX being used with this requirement in mind.
Is TeXmacs better than LyX for users who need to export to LaTeX?
BTW, I think TeXmacs should have a LaTeX mode that uses settings more suitable for documents with LaTeX output in mind. In particular, LaTeX mode would, among other things, use “screen” page rendering to do away with pagination and fixed line length.
I’m not a TeXmacs power user, but I’ve used Lyx for a long time, and I’m still using it for some documents (beamer presentation for example).
With my limited experience, Lyx seems better to me. Perhaps due to the simple fact that Lyx has to deals with the latex class environments the document is using, it’s not the case with Texmacs.
To be completely fair, TeXmacs experience is far smoother and better for document reading, math typesetting and for the overall power it gives to the user.
I use TeXmacs everyday for lectures, presentations, papers, exercise sheets and export most of my documents to LaTeX. There is no need of LaTeX in my workflow, just to send the final version to the editors. Joris and other people I know, including most of my current students and collaborators use it also for slides and other stuff. It is not the aim of this project to be another LaTeX frontend, nor to be limited by LaTeX in the way output is produced. I understand the interest of having a format that can export into multiple ways, but again this has nothing to do with LaTeX, but more it is about restricting the shape of documents in such a way to obtain a reliable translation. Comparison with LyX is to me summarised by this screenshot: https://twitter.com/maxgubi/status/1585012912800026625
Somebody shared with me his exercise sheets written in LyX. It took me 5 minutes to convert them in LaTeX and import them in TeXmacs, I can hide and show the solutions and work with a beautifully typeset document, which is essentially 90% of my workflow.
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An app can act as a LaTeX front end without only being a LaTeX front end.
Don’t you want LyX users to switch to TeXmacs even if most of them only care about LaTeX output?
Why not have some of the TeXmacs UI and marketing aimed at these people?
I’m not sure what you mean. Can you point me to an example?
Personally, as I said above, I do not think that the goal of this project is to ensure interoperability with LaTeX. We already have a good LaTeX export, I use it every time I have to send a paper to an editor and works reasonably well, if you do not use strange construction in your document. So I care for LaTeX output sometimes and TeXmacs is ok for that. Can be made better? Certainly, but this is different from interoperability. An this is not one of my goals (I think to speak also for Joris, as I understand his thinking about it, but I could be wrong, and/or he could have changed his mind).
Well, there is nothing wrong in fork TeXmacs and modify it so that it becomes a LaTeX frontend. At some point LyX people wanted us to join them and use the typesetter in their project, but this didn’t happened because we do not think that one should base the editor on LaTeX. Note that this is different to say that the editor should not export to LaTeX (or HTML, or EPUB, or Markdown, or whatever). Why then do not ask for interoperability with HTML?
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The only inconvenience that I encountered with TeXmacs and about its LaTeX conversion is about commutative diagrams. Right now, the tool in TeXmacs to produce commutative diagrams is primordial, and I use XY-pic, but the conversion does not automatically preserve XY-pic codes.