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.
Maybe it’s a little off topic, but can you elaborate a bit on how to do
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.
especially hide and show the solutions? I’m in need of roughly the same workflow (import exexrcise sheets with hide-able solutions).
@puzzle_fet Welcome to the forum!
Under the menu entry Insert → Fold → Folded, you’ll find some options to try.
I’m aware of various fold environments, what I want to ask is:
- How do you automatically wrap
solutionwithfoldedwhen importing latex? - How can I (un)fold all fold-able envs at once?
Regarding your second question, you might want to explore the style packages under the Education category, such as exam or course. Once one of these packages is activated, you’ll notice an icon with an eye on the mode toolbar, which controls whether the answers are all shown or all hidden. If this doesn’t meet your needs, you could try modifying the related .ts or Scheme files to achieve your desired result.
Apologies that I don’t have the time to delve into the source code, but perhaps @pireddag can assist you further if you have additional questions.
If your second question is resolved, I believe the first one can be solved with a simple click.
I also use Lyx by incorporating R codes. Some time ago I came across TeXmacs. I was happy that TeXmacs has built in R plugin.
But, unfortunately that doesn’t work, showing Busy message all the time, whenever I call R session. I reported this on this forum. But nobody has taken any initiative to make it work.
As for as I know it’s R plugin is written in R, which is out of date. There is also tm_r.c file, which does not compile to executable, in my view.
Therefore, I had to switch back to Lyx. Otherwise, TeXmacs is very convenient for R classes, because it’s R sessions are interactive in contrast to Lyx.
This, It is imperative to to make it work, so that many R users may like to switch to TeXmacs.
Dr. A. K. Singh
Professor of Statistics
IGKV, India
If I understand correctly, @darcy is working on refactoring the plugin manager. It will be completely rewritten, instead of some patches for R plugin, say.
Please remind me which OS are you on. I would restart from Does the R plugin work?, where we found the way to make the plugin work on Linux.
For Windows, I can give to it another try. I do not promise anything.
I agree with the sentiment that having functional plugins promotes the use of TeXmacs. At the moment, and I think forever, plugins are not under the responsibility of TeXmacs’ authors but of the plugin’s authors.
I think that it might be sensible to contact the plugin’s author; on the other hand, since the step that does not work seems the compilation of tm_r.c on Windows, it might be that the author too cannot do it.
I am om Windows. I do everything on Windows. If you can make the plugin work. That would be a great help for R users.