Why some people get upset when they find out what "TeXmacs" really is

#1

Basically, they believe that TeXmacs is getting undeserved attention because they think it is combining the names of two popular software packages that it does not use to increase its own popularity.

For some people, it doesn’t matter just how good TeXmacs is. They will refuse to try it based on principle.

And for this reason, it is hard to market TeXmacs to people who like TeX, emacs, or both. In fact, you might have an easier time marketing the software to people who have never heard of TeX and emacs.

#2

Further, it also closes the door to people who either don’t like emacs or don’t like writing in (La)TeX (but who, presumably, still do so because their circumstances make it necessary for them to typeset math). The name doesn’t suggest TeXmacs is sufficiently different than the experience of editing TeX code or using emacs, both of which might be intimidating to the “low-powered user” on their own, let alone when combined. Ironically, of course, a WYSIWYG like TeXmacs is (imo) a fair bit easier to use than anything that has you hit “compile” on a LaTeX document, and would in fact probably be very useful precisely to those who might be scared off by the name!

The name sounds nice (and is nice to say!) but I agree that it does it no favors when being introduced to anyone who’s formed any opinion on TeX or emacs—one way or another.

Some “good” expectations indicated by the name that I can think of are: 1) you can typeset math here using certain LaTeX-like commands, and if you’ve invested time in learning those, that might be appealing; and 2) keyboard shortcuts and opportunities for customizability abound. Still, I’m not sure this is enough to offset the aforementioned negative consequences of forming the close association to TeX and emacs.

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#3

@darcy maybe mine is an unwelcome suggestion, but … :wink:

One could use a fork of TeXmacs to experiment with the name. There have been many suggestions in several discussions (I did not search for them to refresh my memory before writing), but I found none of the suggestions very appealing.

Maybe one could change the language from which the name is inspired from English to Greek. That is, a name like Graphḗ for example.

#4

Or maybe have a contest to pick a new name with the winner (if any) getting a free copy of the TeXmacs book.

#5

I prefer Esperanto than English or Greek.

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#6

Esperanto is nicer because it is neutral. Now the challenge is to find an elegant, recognizable word. I have tried with “sign” (“Signo”), “pen” (“Plumo”), “pencil” (“Krajono”) and I do not find they are elegant. We need an idea :slight_smile:

#8

This is a difficult task, many times over the years I experienced the enthusiasm in the community to find a new name, eventually this fades sooner or later to rise again some years later. :slight_smile: But I guess that once we come up with the “right” name, there will be a clear shared reaction to this. Note that a change of name is quite “expensive” both in terms of resources than in terms of short term “marketing”. So it should really be worthwhile. I think the direction of less resistance is to “branch out” a, maybe simpler, product which will have naturally a different name, and then see if it grows. This is essentially what happened to Mozilla->Firefox. Seems a reasonable approach. Therefore I welcome the experiments of @darcy to branch TeXmacs into a product of different flavour. Maybe a webasm version could also be the occasion to branch out. We will see. Another direction to look for a new “concept/name” is that of the book of Joris, it is clear that one of the strong points of TeXmacs is to allow a nice user experience, so maybe “Joy” could also be a name, or “Jolly”, or “JollyWrite”, etc… (none of them sounds convincing right now to me, maybe “Joy”, or some other language equivalent for it, e.g. “Gaio”). More simply it could just be “TM”, as a two letter name, without an attached meaning. This is for example how the “NS” stuff in MacOS was born, since was coming from “NeXtStep”.

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#9

I’ve been thinking that “Jolly Writer” isn’t just the name of the TeXmacs book but also an experiment to see whether it would be a good name for TeXmacs.

#10

Hi
Maybe “SciJollyWriter” (Scientific Jolly Writer) or “JollySciWriter”.
Other suggestion : SciJollyTyp (Scientific Jolly Typesetter or typesetting) or JollySciTyp.

best regards

#11

Hi,
Another one that sounds like “TeXmacs” is TextMaths… just an idea.

#12

I am not sure that the current main obstruction is the name, and I don’t think it good to change the name now. TeXmacs is mainly for scientists (for me, I tried to use TeXmacs because my experience of LaTeX is not excellent and I heard the WYSIWYG aspect of TeXmacs), and sadhen’s project Mogan seems to supplement the demand for others.

There are many inconveniences for scientists. For example, for scientists, one might submit papers to journals, and one has to convert them into LaTeX. Usually the conversion is not ideal and it requires a lot of manual modifications (especially when there are diagrams). In that case, for example, when we decide to update the paper later, it would be a bit more difficult to keep them synchronized.

#13

The experience with interoperability with LaTeX that you describe does not corresponds to mine. It would be interesting to have some real-world example where substantial manual intervention is needed in order to understand where are the problems and improve the situation. I think we should be able to have at least a good conversion to LaTeX in one way, i.e. see LaTeX as another output format for TeXmacs, like PDF and HTML. Generic two way conversion is order of magnitude more difficult and in my opinion not a main priority for TeXmacs.

As a practical suggestion: instead of modifying by hand the LaTeX file I usually spend a bit of time to modify the TeXmacs file (or add specific hints to the converter) in order that the automatic conversion works well.

#14

Maybe it is because I don’t know how to hint the converter. I am always talking about one-way conversion, namely from TeXmacs to LaTeX. The problem of synchronization exists precisely because the necessity of manual intervention, and I don’t want to do it every time I convert…

I think that the most salient issue is the conversion of diagrams embedded as graph plugins such as tikz and xypic. Now it is converted into PDFs and then included in the LaTeX source. It is at least better to embed the existing codes into the LaTeX source (I am even not sure whether this is mandatory to submit to journals).

Another issue, which requires slightly less manual operations (it suffices to touch the preamble), is some incompatibility of numberings. For example, the counter (for theorem/definition/… environments) is differently set after conversion. The default setting in TeXmacs is number-us, namely, all of them share the same counter group. After conversion, the counters become independent. And also, I use the number-long-article package, and this numbering style is not taken into account after conversion either. (The journals do not change the numbering style in general in my domains of research, and in my case, it is very important to keep the numbering style unchanged — the theorems are referred via numbers.)

There are other minor points. For example, \dfn is converted into bolden fonts, while in TeXmacs, it is italicized when the context is roman, and is roman if the context is italicized. This is not essential since the journal would modify it anyway.

#15

Here are you referring to the feature of Format → Specific → LaTeX? I have just discovered this feature. I will try to see whether this works smoothly.

#16

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#17

When I first heard about TeXmacs I thought it is another distribution of TeX but for Mac.