Jeremy Henty wrote:
I certainly don't want to appear to be speaking on behalf of the TeXmacs devs.
The point is : as far as I know (I am only *one* among many other contributors), TeXmacs devs are not really interested in displacing LaTeX anymore, because its a neverending job, and there are much more interesting things to develop with TeXmacs than trying to clone perfectly an old-fashioned system, even if it is LaTeX. At least for myself, this is 100% my approach to the LaTeX compatibility problem : forget it ! ;-), and I know this is somehow also the approach of other developers (but I'm not them, thus I cannot develop more precisely).
I believe maths publishers are often quite strict about what macro packages they will accept, so their requirements could be starting point for identifying a useful "clean LaTeX".
By the way, that's the problem : publishers *enforce* the use of a given set of LaTeX style files. But they take null account of the cleanness of the implementation of their style files, nor do they provide access from other editing software. Would they simply accept PDF documents, for example, all the problems we discuss would not exist at all. Another approach which would solve the problem would be to implement a TeXmacs version of the style files for each journal. We know we could do this since a *very long time*, but given the lack of interest from the publishers, because from their point of view, moving is a cost, which brings no benefits (except the comfort of the authors : but they don't care, the "monopoly-like" position of LaTeX crushes the dissenting voices sufficiently efficiently), we need either : -> complaints from the authors to the publishers, in such a way that these publishers are forced to move ; -> contributions from the users, to reimplement the styles of all the journals inside TeXmacs ; But given the fact that none of the two possibilities above has ever been really feasible in the past, we have to acknowledge that there is not a real interest in the community (at large) for improving the LaTeX toolchain. To me, it seems that whether we like it or not, this is somehow a fact. Thus, looking for other directions to develop TeXmacs is the sensible approach, it seems. Best, Henri _______________________________________________ Texmacs-dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/texmacs-dev
