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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.
This reminds me of grape nuts cereal. You look at the ingredients and there are no grapes and no nuts
âNo 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 . . ."
"And?"
"No damn cat, and no damn cradle.â
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. Itâs 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 âgrape sugar,â 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 ânuts.â
[1]
https://www.grapenuts.com/our-story/
Btw, the German word for glucose is Traubenzucker, which literally translates to "grape sugar". I'm not sure if it's also common in English.
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.
I've never used TeXmacs but I do use TeX and Emacs.
Does TeXmacs at least have macros? (That's what "macs" stands for in Emacs)
The Wind Fish in name only, for it is neither.
What a ridiculous name then.
But, a fitting homage to Emacs then:
'A cocky novice once said to Stallman: âI can guess why the editor is called Emacs, but why is the justifier called Bolio?â. Stallman replied forcefully, âNames are but names, âEmack & Bolio'sâ is the name of a popular ice cream shop in Boston-town. Neither of these men had anything to do with the software.â
His question answered, yet unanswered, the novice turned to go, but Stallman called to him, âNeither Emack nor Bolio had anything to do with the ice cream shop, either.'
Exactly what I was thinking
That... is less than straight forward. Quirks of history?
The original plan was to create an editor with the extensibility of emacs and the typesetting abilities of TeX. Hence the name.
Feels unnecessarily misleading.
Looks good but shows that _text-wrap: pretty_ [0] and MathML Core [1] cantât come soon enough.
[0]:
https://drafts.csswg.org/css-text-4/#text-wrap
[1]:
https://mathml-refresh.github.io/mathml-core/
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."
you can opt for MathML or Mathjax output instead of images, but the majority of the math typesetting is more faithfully exported via images.
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.)
What do you want TeX to be replaced by?
As someone who is thinking of putting in the effort to learn TeX... why do you hate it?
TeX or LaTeX?
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.)
Horrible unintuitive error messages when your document fails to compile.
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.
The TeXmacs official book, by Joris van der Hoeven, is just out:
https://www.scypress.com/book_info.html
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.
[1]:
https://stoic-pasteur-d13e52.netlify.app/
But some symbols (e.g. circle) are replaced by '?'.
Are you sure that's not from your display font missing the symbol? I've got (unfilled) circles rendering for me.
It's ASCII '?'. It looks like a problem with TeXmacs converter into MathML, not a rendering problem.
Nice work, but a bit disappointing : formulas are rendered as pictures and therefore can't be selected and copied.
When will HTML be able to render maths natively?
And if it can, shouldn't Texmacs use that?
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.
Well, technically it can already:
And the copy-pasted output isn't even very terrible.
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.
Is this using images for math? Can it use Mathjax for math? Mathjax has nice accessibility tools that is very good for reading math.
Yup, this was my first thought. I think the generated page looks great but it definitely has a11y problems.
Yeah, it would be nicer if it used MathML (via Mathjax or other means).
I prefer SVG images with alt text for the original LaTeX equation.
MathML has terrible browser support [1] and often results in inconsistently rendered, ugly equations.
MathJax and KaTeX are nice but sometimes I prefer not to have JavaScript for these things that ought to be static.
[1]
Odd...why did chrome add support and then rescind it one version later? Or is the table incorrect?
https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=152430...
It's being worked on again though
https://www.chromestatus.com/feature/5240822173794304
by
Sure, let's shift all the incovenience towards the blind, can't have less than the prettiest of formula.
It can be configured to.
On my connection it takes like 30 seconds for the full page to become readable because of all the images. MathML would be more efficient, I think.
MathML is better (in Firefox), but, for example, in the formula at the end of 2.1 section, circle is replaced by '?'.
[0]:
https://stoic-pasteur-d13e52.netlify.app/
Take a look at this PhD thesis. It was converted from real LaTeX to HTML with LaTeXML:
https://asmaier.github.io/phdthesis
Source code is here:
https://github.com/asmaier/phdthesis
They still depend on the old Guile. It needs to be ported to the latest Guile 3.0.x to harness its JIT performance improvements[1].
[1]
https://www.gnu.org/software/guile/news/gnu-guile-300-releas...
Back in 2008, I was fascinated by TeXmacsâ 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 isnât TeX, and people werenât 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 âaâ then <tab> to get α. For fast and accurate math entry, TeXmacs > LyX > text editors with completion.
Pretty except the browser based text justification leaves a lot to be desired.
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?
GNU TeXmacs on github:
https://github.com/texmacs/texmacs
Join us to make GNU TeXmacs better.
On my laptop and desktop I find the font size to be too big. On my phone it is unreadably small.
For a typesetting demo, that is very unfortunate.
Is it possible to use the computer modern font?
You should be able to just set it in the CSS.
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.
it's all about
\usepackage[garamond]{mathdesign}
after running
sudo getnonfreefonts --sys -a
This is great! I like the content of research papers but not the pdf format that they're published in when web browsing.
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.
For GNU TeXmacs 1.99.14, there is also a nice Octave plugins (builtin) for Windows/Linux/macOS.
Cool! Looks nice! Check out
. 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.
Ugh, ugly... It's possible to at least have a clear version?
Heh, I thought that David Harvey had switched fields for a second there.
That's basically what pandoc is for, and it works.
That's like saying we don't need chopsticks for eating food, because that's what forks are for, and they work.
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 wouldâve told him âforks work, thatâs what forks are forâ.
Eating food slowly is healthier.
It looks beautiful. Can it convert pdfs to HTML too?
I believe the built-in Firefox PDF reader does exactly this.
Or you can go for asciidoctor where you get incredibly good html output and PDF output that you can style via css (
https://github.com/Mogztter/asciidoctor-web-pdf
) with mathjax support.