GiovanniP

I think it is fair to point at a paper where Van der Hoeven argues in detail in favor of the WYSIWYG paradigm:

J. van der Hoeven. GNU TeXmacs: a free, structured, wysiwyg and technical text editor. In Daniel Filipo, editor, Le document au XXI-ième siècle, volume 39–40, pages 39–50. Metz, 14–17 mai 2001. Actes du congrès GUTenberg.

Reproduced at https://www.texmacs.org/Data/TeXmacs.pdf

For why so few people use TeXmacs, it may be that it is because few people believe that it is worth trying, as one would not expect that it works so well :-)

I think it is so. As far as I know, there are no converters that can do that. A search with an LLM made me find https://arxiv.org/pdf/2605.16562, a paper describing the ArXiv conversion tool from LaTeX to HTML; here is a sentence from the abstract:

"corpus-scale conversion work aimed at 90% error-free HTML (currently 75%)"

although there may be issues that I do not understand or did not see (I looked at the paper very quickly) that make it more difficult for the authors than for the simplest possible translation.

While Typst appears to be popular, I think that TeXmacs, https://www.texmacs.org/, which is a program independent from both TeX and Emacs, is the kind of program that we need for writing: a fully WYSIWYG, fully structured document preparation system, in which you edit the structure of your document in a WYSIWYG way. When editing the structure on-screen, the user has no need to be aware that is doing so, as it looks like they are editing a text document; at the same time, the TeXmacs editor will guide the user to keeping a structured document.

There is some support for the LaTeX ecosystem from within TeXmacs. If you want a TikZ drawing, you can insert it programmatically into a TeXmacs document in a seamless way---if you have the same font for your TeXmacs document and for LaTeX it will be nicely integrated as far as I know, You can see the blog post https://texmacs.github.io/notes/docs/embedding-tikz-figures-...

It has to do with LaTeX and emacs in intent.

LaTeX: accomplished typography emacs: control of the interface

It delivers.

The name is weird, the project is sound :-)

Superior to LyX: fully WYSIWYG, no limitation on what it can do.

I use it for all of the pedagogical material I distribute to my high school pupils. It allows me to type quickly and accurately math and explanation with exquisite typography. It allows me to edit freely and with total ease what I have already written: I don't have to look for the point where I have to edit because it is WYSIWYG.

I do not have to collaborate with anyone in writing so it does not matter that there are no users among my colleagues.

In my opinion it is superior to all other systems I tried (I tried many and a lot, and all of the main ones). And, importantly, it is equal or superior to the other systems in _all_ respects.

I would rather use TeXmacs, it frees you from the write-compile cycle while being equivalent (maybe in some ways better) from the point of view of the control you have on the document and the typographical quality.

There is also a wide choice of output formats.

In addition to making it possible to write easily, TeXmacs is also based on a markup language. It demonstrates that a markup language and WYSIWYG writing can coexist efficiently.

Only Adobe InDesign provides a comparable implementation, tweaking all those details.

TeXmacs claims to have implemented microtypography as well (https://www.texmacs.org/tmweb/home/news.en.html, as I am reading it, in the opening paragraph on version 2.1)

I agree that the images correspond to the same region in object space. Further assumptions on optical resolution don't work well, as the optical resolution depends on the f-number.

assuming infinite resolution

this is an assumption that goes against the concept of "f-number" so if one does it, they should not expect to get to anything sensible.

I expect depth of focus to be different.

There is some support, but I do not know the details. You might try and ask in the TeXmacs forum, at http://forum.texmacs.cn/; a few of the developers read it and answer questions and they might have the information you are looking for.

"et alii" for people (masculine plural nominative)

"et alia" for things (neutrum plural nominative)

"et cetera" for things as well

1. Write programs that you think are cool

2. Learn about data structures and algorithms and complexity and software organization.

3. Write programs that you think are cool. But since you know more, you can write more cool programs.

Hegel :-)

visual output with suboptimal aesthetics (TeXmacs, and, to some extent, LyX)

Till now I took the developers word that the aesthetics of TeXmacs is better than the one of TeX and I would be curious to know where the opposite is true (and in case also why this cannot change)

Packages for chemistry are useful, even if I don't use them myself. Also siunitx needs yet a TeXmacs equivalent (I think https://github.com/pireddag/SIunits/tree/simple is not yet good enough)

On the other hand if something (in this case ease of installation) helps people to use the tool, then it helps TeXmacs too, which in turn helps users.

And slide presentations.

if you’ve got a niche tool with better UX but no widespread adoption in a very entrenched user base, you’re not going to take over

Yet I think that it is necessary to keep promoting TeXmacs, a niche yet nice tool, as the shortcomings of TeX are significant and I think we need a better took for document preparation.

Here as far as I understand the fact that TeX is a Turing-complete language makes it impossible to write a converter for TeX. I read a post by Joris van der Hoeven where he said that TeX held back every other program by making it impossible to write converters. I did not find that post so I link to

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27604311

where he talks about the same issue.

For questions about TeXmacs please try the forum at http://forum.texmacs.cn/

So certainly there are many more things you can to with TeX (but not with LaTeX itself) than with TeXmacs

Although TeXmacs plus its Scheme extension language is much more powerful than TeXmacs alone.

I do think that TeXmacs can be used as a generic Word clone with beautiful typesetting, maybe "out-of-the-box", maybe with a little bit of tweaking. If you need tweaking, the forum at http://forum.texmacs.cn/ may be helpful. For the resume, you may want to check out some cv templates in https://github.com/texmacs/tm-forge under the `examples` directory.

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.

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).

Has this recently become better?

You should try TeXmacs; it is not recent, but it has become smooth and it is superior to both LaTeX and Word under every point of view.

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.