On 24 Apr 2001, Stefano Ghirlanda wrote:
> Question 5. What are the differences between TeXmacs and LyX?
>
> Answer. TeXmacs is a more ambitious project. Some of its major
> advantages are the following:
>
> 1.TeXmacs is fully WYSIWYG.
With all the problems that entails. Including a frustrating interface --
at least on the version I tried a year ago -- that requires you to be in
its page-size mode (or whatever they call it) in order to print. Very
frustrating when you just want to use it like you use LyX.
> 2.TeXmacs has a professional typesetting quality and nicer fonts.
I think (hope) they are only talking about the on-screen display. If they
seriously think they are in TeX' league for typeset output then they must
be using TeX internally.
The anti-aliased fonts are _very_ nice. I think we should be able to get
those faster just by using the anti-aliased canvas from an appropriate
toolkit or straight from X (well XFree86 anyway).
> 3.TeXmacs comes with the Guile/Scheme extension language.
Hmmm... we'll almost certainly end up with Python. Asger has already
shown about 3 years ago that Python can be embedded in a couple of lines.
The problem is more a matter of "should we, yet?"
> 4.You can use TeXmacs as an interface to computer algebra systems.
I'll give them that one for the moment (although Maple LaTeX import
apparently works) and we've had at least two different interested groups
start some work on this but they seem to have disappeared.
Allan. (ARRae)
