How would you convince academics that the WYSIWYG TeXmacs won’t become the new Word in this respect?
The real reason for requiring LaTeX submissions in academia?
Why you think this is a real problem? It is your impression or you have some fact/observations which make you think that?
Why else would theoretical computer scientists be so against TeXmacs? Reviewing papers full of math is hard work and they don’t want to waste their time reviewing incorrect papers.
This is your opinion. I would like to see it corroborated by some facts, even some personal anecdotes, it is difficult for me to appreciate what is the target of your critique. Why you say that they are against TeXmacs? Are they also against LyX or Scientific Workplace?
Are they against Markdown+Pandoc? (it seems hard to me to believe). Actually there are theoretical computer scientists which compose their documents in Racket:
https://docs.racket-lang.org/scribble/index.html
In this thread I gave you a lot of references which disprove or at least challenge your claims. You gave only that reference to a blog, and I provided a reasonable explanation for that claim which indeed in part I share. In particular I do not see it as a direct critique to TeXmacs or to any other similar alternative. If you think so, then maybe you should explain to me why, because for me it is hard to understand.
Can we base our discussion more on facts? I would be eager to see some, so that we have matter for discussion and progress.
Take a look at the comments on the blog post.
From Scott (the author of the blog post):
NER: All I claim is that empirically, it’s a very successful heuristic.
As for why this is so, one might speculate as follows: those who can’t be bothered to learn the tools, notation, conventions, etc. of whatever subject they’re writing about, are highly correlated (though not identical) with those who can’t be bothered to learn the subject itself.
From a comment by asdf:
What can I say; if a paper is full of spelling errors, that doesn’t necessarily mean the mathematical content is wrong, but it’s not a good sign. TeX is part of mathematical culture and using anything else might be similar to using an unconventional notation for a familiar math concept. Again, not conclusive, but not a good sign. Nothing short of actually reading a paper (or at least reading enough to find a definite error) is enough to form a conclusive judgement of its content. But lots of things, like the presence or absence of spelling errors and weird notation and typography, can raise or lower expectations at the outset. That I think is what Scott was trying to get at.
From an anonymous comment:
Nobody’s saying the use of TeX is a fully reliable test for whether a paper is good, but here’s an analogy:
Suppose someone handwrites a paper in crayon. Logically, this tells us nothing about the content of the paper, but in practice, it tells us a lot about the author. Very few people who write in crayon have anything interesting or worthwhile to say. It’s not a logical guarantee, but if you see a research paper written in crayon, it’s perfectly reasonable not to take it seriously (since it almost certainly isn’t serious).
Not using TeX in a math/CS paper is not nearly as extreme as writing in crayon, but it is similar in spirit. There are a handful of older or eccentric researchers who have never learned TeX. Other than that, anybody in math or theoretical CS who doesn’t use TeX looks like a rube. This may not be fair, but it’s a true statement about appearances within the community.
Still, my interpretation is not challenged by these comments. This blog post is from ~2008, it mostly refer to Word-written papers, unless somebody say the opposite, since as I told you, no normal researcher can make the difference between TeXmacs and LaTeX-generated PDF. I think the only way you have to find out is to ask explicitly the author of the blog post if it was mentioning all the other softwares. He is just ignorant there are other possibilities. And again you attach too much importance to a single instance which do not address specifically the question of TeXmacs. What if one uses Lout? Is better or worser than using LaTeX? Given that Lout is more “niche” I would guess that mathematicians using Lout are more knowledgeable than those using LaTeX. So the opposite deduction is true: if you use Lout you are better than using LaTeX because it identifies you as a more knowledgeable person which does not just follow the behaviour of the mass.
Check out Scott Aaronson’s reply to a recent comment I made on his blog: https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=5486#comments
My comment:
What do you think of this discussion on the real reason for requiring LaTeX submissions in academia?
http://forum.texmacs.cn/t/the-real-reason-for-requiring-latex-submissions-in-academia
To which Scott replies:
Amir Michail #4: You’re on to our secret.
(I say “our” even though after 25 years, I still haven’t learned LaTeX very well, and continue to use Scientific Workplace as a front end…)
Using LyX, Scientific Workplace, TeXmacs, etc. is fine as long as you export to LaTeX and fix any issues that arise before submission. So LaTeX remains as a filter to discourage non-serious submissions.
What is the problem? If your PDF fails to render in a PDF viewer who has to fix the issue?
Let me say a little bit in this discussion. I use Latex since 1994 (around this year). After many years of working with latex, it is very easy for me to make everything that I need. About TexMacs. As for me, it is a very useful package. The problem, in my opinion, is Scheme as the basis of it. It will be very great if we can get the GUI of TexMacs in the present form, but the file created will be exactly Latex, without Scheme. This idea was realized in the Bakoma package http://www.bakoma-tex.com/menu/about.php. In this package, you write text as in TexMacs without knowledge of tex code but the file created in Latex. But Bakoma is not free and I see it is a dying package (for sale). There is another new project SwiftLatex with the same idea, but in the present form it is very slow and useless for work.
TeXmacs doesn’t use TeX. It has its own WYSIWYG typesetting engine that yields similar but not identical results to TeX/LaTeX. Although it can export to LaTeX, the result isn’t the same.
@JoePass I’m not sure I understand correctly your point. Scheme is a language used in TeXmacs to define and program the user interface. It can be also used to perform certain manipulations of the documents when the macro language (which is different) is not versatile enough. The document itself does not contain any scheme usually, and especially if you convert the document in LaTeX there is no scheme there. So I do not understand what you mean with
If you write your document in TeXmacs and then export to LaTeX there is no scheme code there.
Many of us used LaTeX since long time (for me it started around 1996 when I was a student in physics) and many of us know to use LaTeX well. The point is not this, is the fact that TeXmacs allows to concentrate on what is important (I wrote a short article explaining this point of view here: https://texmacs.github.io/notes/docs/art-of-math-writing.html ) and still produce a LaTeX file at the end, to send to editors or to put on arXiv. As far as I know no other software give me the same quality and smooth workflow and in particular avoid me to split my window in two parts and wait for the compilation of the file every time I make a change. In the past there were systems capable of some of these features: TeXtures on Mac and BaKoMa TeX on Windows (but I never tried any of them) and both based on TeX. However both disappeared so I cannot draw a conclusive comparison of them with TeXmacs.
Approaching Scheme takes time, and I agree that it may put off people, but with some experience it becomes fun to program with it. In my opinion the fun comes from the very strong modularity of the code that one can write—it feels like playing with LEGO bricks.
Said this, perhaps having an additional scripting language might help.
Yes, I know. The first moment I was charmed TexMacs. But when I tried to make any more then I met a problem with scheme. Here, in the forum there some of my discussions about some problems which I met. I even started to learn scheme and racket. But I think you agree with me, that we would like to see some editor simple but powerful and useful for work, for work but not as a toy for playing. In every way, I support this project. GUI of Texmacs is good but in the end, I need for tex file to send to an editor. Then, I need to communicate with the editor, change the file according to the referee’s suggestion and send another tex file. But it is very difficult to make these operations through the Texmacs. It requires more works to go through this tonnel between Texmacs and Latex. I wrote above my wishes, only.
@pireddag, I think you miss the point: a basic user does not have to learn Scheme to use TeXmacs. Indeed I claim even a moderate user of LaTeX do not know how to use TeX macro system to write macros (apart from very simple ones). TeX macro system is more difficult to use than Scheme.
@JoePass raise a problem which I would like to understand better since it is not clear to me exactly what it is. Which kind of modifications you are referring to? Why they are easier to do in LaTeX/TeX than in TeXmacs in your own experience? It would be useful for me (and the other developers) to understand precise situations so that we can address the shortcomings.
PS: just to be clear, a real TeX macro looks like this
% Subsections. We don't want a break at the glue if we were preceded by
% a \nobreak.
%
\def\subsection#1 \par{%
\par % be sure we're in vertical mode
\saveskip = \lastskip % will be 0 if no skip
\ifheading % Did we just have \section?
\nobreak
\fi
\combineskips\abovesubsectionskip
\dimen0 = 2.5\baselineskip \advance\dimen0 by -\topskip
\vskip -\dimen0
\vglue \dimen0
%
{\subsectionfonts
\leftline{\vrule width.5em height1.2ex depth.2ex \enspace #1}}%
\writetocentry{subsection}{#1}%
\nobreak
% Don't go into horizontal mode within the command descriptions.
\vskip\belowsubsectionskip
\ifcommands \else \noindent \fi
\headingtrue
\everypar = {\headingfalse \global\everypar = {}}%
% only gets executed for \par in horizontal mode
\ignorespaces
}
If you think that it will be easier for you to undestand this than a Scheme program…
@JoePass I’ve tried to give a look at your previous contributions to the forum, to find the shortcomings you were mentioning in this thread. I found the one regarding the workflow with .bib files and I tried to address on that thread your concerns. It would help me also to have a list of other similar concerns, in particular those which from your experience make the workflow to export to LaTeX for submission problematic. And also I would like to hear your opinion on how these problems would look like in a typical LaTeX-only workflow. I expect some of the problems to disappear but also other to be similar or equivalent (e.g. the extraction of a local .bib file).
A detail on this (also as a suggestion for @JoePass) : in my opinion questions on “how to correct errors in the LaTeX document that I exported from TeXmacs” are on-topic here. @darcy and @mgubi, what do you think? In this way the immediate concern (“How can I send my manuscript to the editor?”) would be addressed.
Following up on both @mgubi post above and on a post of JdvH on the mailing list (https://lists.texmacs.org/wws/arc/texmacs-users/2021-04/msg00059.html), knowing about these errors is helpful to develop a better export filter.
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I see you are an expert in Tex language. I did not use Tex so deep as you do. I’d like to explain my point. In Tex community, there are a huge amount of packages and styles already done. If I need something special I use these styles. It is very useful - I do not need to write something as you wrote. This is the power of Tex and Latex. I need only find the corresponding style and open guide for it. In my system, there is texdoctk to any style. I have to learn only once about using preamble and new write commands. Couple examples. I need slashed letters (Dirac notations) and I use package slashed. Another example - I need hyperreferences - I use hyperref style. A couple of short strings in the preamble and I have the effect which I need. There are a lot of examples more. I already discussed here this question. It will be very powerful if it will be something for Texmacs. Another example about bibliography. If I need to use many references as a singe I use the apsrev4-2 style. The system of BibTeX with many collections of references is very useful for work. I discussed here this possibility in Texmacs. I wrote in savannah my suggestion. Another example appeared recently due to remote education. The package probsol solved all my problems with a database of problems for tests. Texmacs has a useful GUI, but changing something is rather difficult.
Another side of the discussion. At the present time, the communication with editors and journals is very simple. We use a style of journal to write paper. And any suggestions are easy to put in a file and then by using latexdiff it is easy to show editor the changes which I made. The latexdiff is very useful for writing joint papers. I see all changes which made my coauthor. I look at Latex as an instrument that I need to work.
Why do I try to use Texmacs? I see year for the year the problem of students when we start to write something in latex. I remember my problems with writing latex files when I was a postgraduate student. We usually use now with students the overleaf site. For this reason, I started to look into the wyswyg packages which can work with latex. As for me, the ideal to get a package with GUI as Texmacs and a good Latex file without convert. In the best case, it must be as a pen, without programming, but with quality as Latex. I tried to use Texmacs for the last paper but I see that the convert between Texmacs and Latex needs much additional work. And what is worst is that due to these converts many additional typos may appear.