Note that TeXmacs is not based on TeX/LaTeX (and not on Emacs either). It is a completely independent editor, typesetting language, graphical frontend etc, all in one.
Its developer, Joris van der Hoeven, is one of the co-authors of this research paper that has been exported to HTML, so I presume that the paper was written specifically in/for TeXmacs: your arbitrary LaTeX document won't be so easily importable into TeXmacs AFAIK.
“No wonder kids grow up crazy. A cat's cradle is nothing but a bunch of X's between somebody's hands, and little kids look and look and look at all those X's . . ."
How it came to be called Grape-Nuts when it is neither is explained on grapenuts.com [1]:
> Grape-Nuts actually contains neither grapes nor nuts. It’s made from wheat and barley. So, why is it called Grape-Nuts? As with many great emblems in history, there are two versions of the story. One says that Mr. Post believed glucose, which he called “grape sugar,” formed during the baking process. This, combined with the nutty flavor of the cereal, is said to have inspired its name. Another explanation claims that the cereal got its name from its resemblance to grape seeds, or grape “nuts.”
My father's hometown, in the United States, had a total of five German language daily newspapers when he was a boy. This was a bit after C.W. Post died, but I expect that either it was German influence or at the time both Americans and Germans (and German-Americans) referred to dextrose as grape sugar and that usage just faded among the English speaking populations.
'A cocky novice once said to Stallman: “I can guess why the editor is called Emacs, but why is the justifier called Bolio?”. Stallman replied forcefully, “Names are but names, ‘Emack & Bolio's’ is the name of a popular ice cream shop in Boston-town. Neither of these men had anything to do with the software.”
His question answered, yet unanswered, the novice turned to go, but Stallman called to him, “Neither Emack nor Bolio had anything to do with the ice cream shop, either.'
Agreed. My first thoughts were: "Great, just a few text formatting glitches. Oh, and I wish we could get away from using images for all the math symbols."
This is an interesting project, don't try reading the page in "reader mode" you will be disappointed. And as it is pointed out elsewhere don't try throwing your LaTex paper at it, that isn't what it is.
What it is, is a package that one can write such a paper in, and then "publish" it to the web. Which, as a special purpose CMS, has uses. Papers are a reasonably large body of work.
What I keep hoping for is a 'journal' that publishes papers in their mark up language that look good on the web, or when printed on paper, and retain meta data for good reference chasing. Further, the amount of typographic artifacts that should be thrown around with the paper would ideally be minimal and widely distributed/standardized.
This is a hard problem, and one of the first inspirations for creating the world wide web. So any efforts that so progress are to be lauded and this is one such effort.
I used TeXmacs for a while back in 2006-7. It had a beautiful wysiwyg interface and the most elegant way of writing equations. You used the tab key a lot to cycle between symbols. So "3=<tab>4" might turn the = into an equivalence sign; another tab might give you approximately equal; and so on. Or "a -> <tab> " would let you cycle through different arrow styles.
In the end I gave up because LyX seemed better supported. I've not tried it for a long time. Since then I've learned to hate TeX vehemently; that system really needs to die. It would be good to have more alternatives. (TeXmacs itself isn't TeX, but uses some weird lisp-like syntax IIRC.)
TeX is a typesetting system that may be interesting to learn if you're interested in that sort of thing. LaTeX is a collection of TeX macros that are used while preparing documents, and probably isn't worth the effort to learn unless you have a specific need for it.
LaTeX has a number of positives. One is that it encourages the writer to focus upon the logical structure of documents, rather than the formatting. This is useful when preparing an articles or books for publication (when the publisher supports or accepts LaTeX). LaTeX is also good for certain types of technical publications, particularly those involving mathematics, since it handles the typesetting.
Beyond that, LaTeX is an unwieldy mess. If the standard macros don't do what you want of them, you either need to create your own or find some made by someone else. In many respects, it is like working with a library with programming. You'll need to figure out how to properly install those macros and you will need to figure out how to use them. Most people avoid the former by installing a rather massive TeX distribution that satisfies most of their needs. There is no way to get around the latter. You will have to read the documentation.
Once you have everything you need and know how to use it, there is the problem of creating the actual document. Tables and figures may not appear where you wish them to and there are times when you may wish to do something unusual, such as placing a wide table on it's own page and rotating it 90 degrees. Pretty much anything you may need to do is doable, but it is non-trivial to figure out. Not only is is non-trivial to do, but it is entangled in markup that is frequently difficult to read and may require a "compilation" to see the outcome.
None of that is meant to discourage you from learning LaTeX. There are cases where it is tremendously useful, it may be easier than the alternatives, and the quality of the product is usually quite good. The problem is that you pretty much need to know when to use LaTeX to reap the actual benefits.
> One is that it encourages the writer to focus upon the logical structure of documents, rather than the formatting. This is useful when preparing an articles or books for publication (when the publisher supports or accepts LaTeX)
This is the theory, but almost never been my experience. When I wrote for journals, and for my thesis, it was never the case where I could just use their style files and put in the content and the formatting would work out. Not even close. I always had to fiddle with formatting to get it to be good enough for the journal.
You are, of course, correct. I went down that road when hired to edit the LaTeX of a book for publication. Yet I also look at it as a case of LaTeX encouraging documents to be logically structured in the writing phase and doing the actual formatting later. It is, after all, a cumbersome process that is best handled when the text is ready. (Granted, that may be specific to the circumstances in which I used LaTeX.)
This is a problem with LaTeX, not TeX: whenever I've used plain TeX I've found the error messages extremely relevant and helpful; it's really pleasant to use. Yes you need to read the manual once to understand the conventions used, but after that, when typesetting your document, the error handling is very graceful and tells you everything you need to know.
Bottom line: it's a leftover from the 1980s. In the 1980s it was probably quite good. So was the Commodore 64, but you wouldn't use it to write your thesis on in 2020, now, would you?
It's a mess of multiple command line tools which run each other. None of which I understand or want to learn. tex, xetex, latex, xelatex, biblatex, texi2dvi, latexmk... What?
Its error messages might be very useful if you were running them by hand in 1985, instead of via 5 other tools. Literally these messages say things like "just type ? now", as if I'm doing this shit manually. No, I'm not, because I desire to use a computer to automate these tasks.
It gets in the way. If I open my article in a text editor, I want to see the title, author, abstract and first paragraph. Not 100 lines of backslashed computer blah. If I want to insert a picture, I don't want to have to write a paragraph of backslashed computer blah.
It's ugly. I don't want to see backslashes everywhere. I don't want to write `` to open quotation marks. I don't want to write \'e for é. I want to look at something nice when I write English.
Its model is that the markup specifies semantics, not syntax or layout. So you write \emph{} to emphasize something. This is bullshit. There are 100 reasons to use, e.g., italics: emphasis, foreign language, technical terms, etc. etc. Are we going to have a keyword for each of those? No. Just let me use italics. (Of course, they have that as well. Congratulations, you timewasters.)
Its culture is toxically up its own posterior. Oh, it's pronounced techhhh? Thank you for informing me, neccccchbeard. And if I have to read one more time "oh, don't use vertical lines in tables, just use \booktabs" in response to a question about HOW TO DO something....
Its toxic culture has infected academia. I've got referee reports saying "this wasn't written in TeX" as if that were a legitimate critique. PhD students are forced to learn it and spend nights crying and trying to make their tables work. Then they get Stockholm syndrome, become vastly proud that they know to write \ldots when they mean ..., and pass the filthy disease on to their students in turn.
tl:dr; Use HTML. Use Markdown. Use Microsoft Word. Hell, use RTF. Don't use TeX. Don't let your friends use TeX. Stop the madness now. Just Say No.
Worth mentioning that TeXmacs can export formulas as MathML rather images though typesetting won't be perfect. For example see [1] for the title's paper.
TeXmacs can export formulae in MathJax format--there is a setting for that; I have been able to copy formulae to the clipboard (using right-click -> Copy to Clipboard, not by selecting) obtaining what seemed to me the correct LaTeX code. I do not know what is the standard for copying MathJax; I have see this thread of November 2019 (https://github.com/mathjax/MathJax/issues/2240) where someone states that " MathJax output can't be copied directly from the page in version 3", so perhaps the copying of the output with the right click menu is the standard now.
TeXmacs can also export to MathML, I tested it and the output was not satisfactory there.
As a mathematician I appreciate the greatness of the extended TeX universe as much as anyone, but this is fuuuuuugly. The equation font is too light and weak compared to the text, and the equations don't align nearly as well to the text as in a normal LaTeX PDF.
Back in 2008, I was fascinated by TeXmacs’ sessions concept. You could mix rich text with Python, or SAGE. This is long before the days of jupyter and I thought it was the coolest thing. Since TeXmacs isn’t TeX, and people weren’t looking for Python notebooks, it was hard to convince others to try this document processor with Emacs bindings. I still ended up using it for some personal classwork as an undergrad, and slowly watched Jupyter overtake it in polish and adoption.
One killer feature that made it possible to take real-time class notes in TeXmacs is that one could type symbols like Greek letters by typing something like “a” then <tab> to get α. For fast and accurate math entry, TeXmacs > LyX > text editors with completion.
I don't get it. It's practically unreadable on my screen. What I see is white on black in huge text (24 point or more?) with the formulae rendered as images. Am I doing something wrong?
Though I suppose it's possible to switch to Computer Modern via the CSS, the equations seems to be included as PNG's. The font of those would not change simply by modifying the CSS.
Reflowing papers often produces subpar results. The authors often pay attention to details like on which page certain tables and figures end up, that equations appear where they should etc. I've seen many attempts at rendering HTML from e.g. Arxiv papers and the layout is almost always broken. Paper authors often employ a lot of Latex wizardry to get precisely the layout that they want, and these conversion tools mostly choke on that.
This is definitely true. There are also other things that are very difficult to get to work for math papers in HTML (even with conversions) such complex TikZ and other diagrams. Also, HTML rendering is still pretty ugly compared to LaTeX PDFs because LaTeX has a much better typesetting engine including hyphenation. With subtle changes meaning huge semantic differences in math diagrams, I still much prefer to read PDFs.
Right, changing the equation fonts may also create ambiguity, some custom, complicated equations (several levels of super and subscript, various bars etc) might use some latex hacks or workarounds.
It would require that the authors also create and polish an HTML version, which is extra work.
Even on the official IEEE sites papers look way worse in the HTML view, even though I guess someone at least tries to tweak the to appear okayish.
Purists would argue to separate the "presentation layer" from the underlying content, but it's never like that in the messy real world. Content and presentation are very much intertwined and abstractions are too leaky.
Cool! Looks nice! Check out https://kontxt.io. It can convert PDFs to HTML. It also adds an inline collaboration layer to the document with inline highlights, comments, @mentions, polls, tags, and smart navigation. I've tried it on academic papers from arXiv. Awesome for sharing and collaborating with others.
I once watched my father in law try to eat rice with chopsticks. It was an excruciating, grain by grain process. Truly terrible to behold. I wish I would’ve told him “forks work, that’s what forks are for”.
Its developer, Joris van der Hoeven, is one of the co-authors of this research paper that has been exported to HTML, so I presume that the paper was written specifically in/for TeXmacs: your arbitrary LaTeX document won't be so easily importable into TeXmacs AFAIK.