Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by GiovanniP 1430 days ago
> Students seem to spend lost weeks and months fiddling with MS-Word only to create mediocre looking output.

I am suprised, and keep being surprised, that people haven't yet figured out that there is an excellent tool, that is TeXmacs, that manages to make WYSIWYG the best way to write structured documents while having complete control on the output and never having to fiddle with details.
2 comments
LEARAX 1430 days ago
This was not my experience with TeXmacs. I tried it recently after using LaTeX for all of my papers, and while it is nice, it is not replacing LaTeX for me.

Table output in particular was much lower quality than LaTeX with booktabs. I think I had to manually resize columns, which was tedious, and I never had to do that with LaTeX. There were a lot of similar situations I found myself in, where I wound up needing to fight TeXmacs quite a bit to get it to output what I wanted.

I prefer my LaTeX workflow where I can edit markup in Emacs, and have a preview almost instantly generated next to my editor by a filesystem watcher & makefile. TeXmacs necessitates using its own interface (which lacks my vim keybindings and Emacs customizations) and I could not find many resources on editing TeXmacs documents in external programs.

I did appreciate that the general typesetting in TeXmacs was high quality, and the ability to type TeX macros and get e.g. enumerated lists quickly was very nice. But overall, I prefer LaTeX.

link
GiovanniP 1430 days ago
> TeXmacs necessitates using its own interface (which lacks my vim keybindings and Emacs customizations)

TeXmacs's own interface is deeply customizable by the user via Scheme.

I think you can set it up to have vim keybindings---see experimental code at https://github.com/chxiaoxn/texmacs-vi-experiment and comments at http://forum.texmacs.cn/t/a-very-tiny-vim-in-texmacs/176 (I know that the lack of a block cursor has put off someone, but I did not find that comment in the brief search I did now).

link
copperx 1430 days ago
It's always been a mystery to me why TeXmacs is so good yet obscure. I've stayed away from it because I feared there was a caveat that I didn't know about.
link
GiovanniP 1430 days ago
I am using it since several years and I have yet to find the caveat :-)

It has low discoverability, so you have to go through the manuals, the mailing list and the forum (and maybe the blog too, at https://texmacs.gitee.io/notes/docs/main.html) to figure out all that it can do, and to have complete control. On the other hand, it is quite usable with default settings.

link
kryptiskt 1429 days ago
It has a terrible name, conflating TeX and Emacs signals something arcane, doubly so.
link