Slashdot Mirror

Though not technically LaTeX if you want to type math as fast as handwritten (images aside) if not faster you would use GNU TeXmacs. After a while you learn the shortcuts because it shows you the shortcut for every symbol you find in the menu (e.g. "p tab" for pi). Also one can quickly navigate to parts of large symbols (e.g. _ subscript and ^ superscript for integrals and summations). See page 5 here (PDF warning) for an example of how one enters a simple summation.

In my grad school days I reached a point where I easily exceeded handwritten speed.

Though not technically LaTeX if you want to type math as fast as handwritten (images aside) if not faster you would use GNU TeXmacs. After a while you learn the shortcuts because it shows you the shortcut for every symbol you find in the menu (e.g. "p tab" for pi). Also one can quickly navigate to parts of large symbols (e.g. _ subscript and ^ superscript for integrals and summations). See page 5 here (PDF warning) for an example of how one enters a simple summation.

In my grad school days I reached a point where I easily exceeded handwritten speed.

Have you ever used TeXmacs, and do you have an opinion of it? I suspect you have, since "what you see is what you mean" is a phrase of which they are quite fond.

For those who have not: TeXmacs is a graphical editor which implements the typesetting rules from TeX in an editor whose interface is inspired by emacs. (M-x commands, and all.) It does not use LaTeX as an intermediate rendering engine. I used it for a while. It has some virtue.

TeXmacs is pretty great; the UI has a lot of issues (menus are a mess, keyboard shortcuts are really unusual, too many damn preferences...), but the core functionality is solid.

Guile 2 was a major upgrade to Guile's performance and expressiveness as a language, and has become a pleasant foundation for its users.

Who are its users? The Guile homepage states:

Successful and long-lived examples of Free Software projects that use Guile are TeXmacs, LilyPond, and GnuCash.

How many of those are using Guile 2 yet? Zero as far as I can tell.

TeXmacs lists on its todo page: "Internally present Guile as a plug-in, which could later be replaced by another Scheme implementation."

For awhile I was using TeXmacs, which is combination of Emacs and TeX WYSIWYG. After getting accustomed to it, typing out equations is really fast. I haven't used it in several years, though.

Back when I was taking math classes, I used a program called TeXmacs for taking math notes. It's a (almost) WYSIWYG editor with a well-designed system for inputting equations, using sensible key bindings for all the common mathematical symbols and operators.

Despite the name, it's not related to either TeX nor Emacs. But it does use TeX's fonts - which result in equations that are almost as good looking as the ones from TeX.

It worked fast enough for me to keep up with all my math lectures.

I used TeXmacs (on Linux) to take notes in all of my classes, and it was great for all of my subjects. My math notes were perfect, and I could convert them to PDF for emailing to classmates, but the only downside was that I never worked out how to input graphs (I could never sketch them in handwritten notes, anyway).

The main problem here is that making such a program without throwing away at least some of the good features of TeX/LaTeX is hard, and the market is small so there is not much manpower available. There is at present not even a full-fledged GUI toolkit for mathematical typesetting (GtkMathView is good, but this really should be integrated tightly with a text typesetting engine such as Pango).
One attempt you might want to have a look at is TeXmacs, which at least keeps a very structured approach to document creation and has all the TeX typesetting and layout algorithms.

GNU TeXmacs is the best document processor out there. It is also Free as in speech. It is inspired by TeX, but not a frontend for LaTeX like LyX as many believe. It will import your old LaTeX documents. I've used it to write my thesis (100 pages plus many, many figures and photos) and it works excellent, because you don't have to worry about layout. It just produces beautiful text and math.

http://www.texmacs.org/

huu? I wrote my dissertation with TeXmacs, and I find it a good piece of software, not perfect, but it works and the wysiwyg typing is a very plus!

Despite it's non-standard interface (which is been rewritten right now), it can increase your productivity, what 5, 10-fold?

One AC piggybacking off another:

what about Texmacs?

Look at texmacs There's a slight learning curve - make sure to change the key bindings. I've been using it for about a year after using Kile for nearly three and would never go back.

I meant to write Kile, not Lyx. Sorry slashdot.

How about we don't use any of them? LaTeX is way better than any WYSIWYG.

+1

It's a shame that LaTeX isn't more widely used. There seems to be a stigma surrounding anything non-WYSIWYG.

I completely disagree. WYSIWYG and good formatting aren't mutually exclusive.

I've been using texmacs for about a year and have yet to find something that I can't do it that I can in LaTex. At the same time it's WAY faster: I started typing up my ( math ) problems sets in about the same time it took me to write them out by hand and re-copy them.

Look at texmacs

There's a slight learning curve - make sure to change the key bindings. I've been using it for about a year after using Lyx for nearly three and would never go back.

http://texmacs.org/ FREE!

from the looks of the front page you would think math geeks would only use it but it also functions as an excellent word processor...

The closest I have seen to what you describe is GNU TeXmacs:
http://www.texmacs.org/

(Note: The only thing TeX about it is in the name. It actually does not use TeX but it accepts TeX commands if you don't want to learn the keyboard shortcuts. I don't know any TeX and use this program often.)

Key shortcuts work similar to emacs. The key shortcuts are usually listed next to the feature in the GUI so you can pick easily on the ones you use most. After using it for a while and picking up on the key shortcuts you can type math almost as fast as you can write it on paper. Definitely faster if you need to copy paste blocks of math to other places in the same document or to others. Also remember the tab key is your friend.

It can also be seamlessly connected to external programs such as Maxima (this really saves time since you can just tab over to Maxima in TeXmacs, do some symbolic calculation, and copy/paste the output back to the document you were working on).

You can also draw graphs in TeXmacs directly using the built in tools or use the TeXmacs interface to GNUplot.

Compared to the documents of my peers, who are stuck in their TeX/LaTeX ways, my documents look more professional, clean, and consistent in format. Also the time they spend writing their math in TeX/LaTeX is much longer than the time they could write it in TeXmacs. TeXmacs allows me to concentrate more on the math and not the mechanics of typing it.

Forgive me if this is sounding too much like an advertisement but it is just my experience with TeXmacs. I don't know what the learning curve is for TeX/LaTeX (since I never had to learn them) is (but judging from the size of the books devoted to Tex/LaTeX it looks like way too much for me) but I am sure the learning curve for TeXmacs is less steep and I suggest you give it a try.

Though not exactly a math program, TeXmacs is very good
at documenting math using plugins. It can even document
while interacting with Maxima or Octave. Check it out at
      http://www.texmacs.org/

I have a suggestion that you probably didn't even want!
TeXmacs

The compromise is to use a TeX based wysiwig like TeXmacs. It's pretty slick and has really nice typesetting.

Recenlty, a Presentation mode feature
has been added to GNU TeXmacs. Now
you can use the wysiwyg LaTeX quality
of TeXmacs together with the full-screen,
possibly iteractive presentation of a
set of slides.

http://www.texmacs.org/

There's also TeXmacs (http://www.texmacs.org/), which is even more WYSIWYG than Lyx and even easier to learn if you know LaTeX (you can type pretty much any backslash sequence); only problem is that it's a bit slow and the (proprietary?) UI is clunky.

Lyx is not the only usable latex editor.

I have found TeXmacs pretty good too.

http://www.texmacs.org

They also have a (beta) version that runs on Windows (I tested it. Works fine.)

There are other commercial editor also.

• Scientific Workplace (proprietary, win32 only
• LyX (F/OSS)
• TeXmacs (F/OSS)
• AbiWord (F/OSS, not the best TeX editor (but I had none of the problems you had))

Another option is TeXmacs, which is similar to LyX, but it does not use LaTeX as a backend, and that gives some other advantages too. (and it is part of the GNU project if that matters to you)

http://www.texmacs.org/

Ah yes...I'm sure that will work. Tell me, where do I get a free WYSIWG editor so that I can collaborate with other people who can't write latex?

Here.

What? There isn't one?

There is one. See the link above.

Well, that's not going to work, is it?

It is going to work, if you have Windows, Linux, BSD or a Mac.

Have you tried GNU TeXmacs? It's heavily LaTeX-inspired, but WYSIWYG, and also supports scripting in Scheme. Unfortunately, it's pretty slow.

If you want something like Maple, but open source, try getting Maxima. It runs on Windows and Linux, can do algebra, calculus, and a good amount of other stuff, and you can use TeXmacs as a front end.

TexMacs,
best TeX editor ever.

• R, including several add-on packages (such as tseries, RODBC, coda, mcmcpack, gtkdevice, rgtk, rquantlib, qtl, dbi, rmysql), out-of-the box support for the powerful ESS modes for XEmacs as well as the Ggobi visualisation program;
• A complete teTeX, TeX, and LaTeX setup for scientific publishing, along with TeXmacs and LyX for wysiwyg editing;
• Perl and Python with loads of add-ons, plus ruby, tcl, Lua, and Scientific and Numeric Python;
• The Emacs and Vim editors, as well as Gnumeric, kate, Koffice, jed, joe, nedit and zile;
• Octave, with add-on packages octave-forge, octave-sp, octave-epstk, and matwrap;
• Computer-algebra systems Maxima, Pari/GP, GAP, GiNaC and YaCaS;
• the QuantLib quantitative finance library including its Python interface;
• GSL, the Gnu Scientific Library (GSL) including example binaries;
• The GNU compiler suite comprising gcc, g77, g++ compilers;
• the OpenDX, Plotmtv, and Mayavi data visualisation systems;
• it includes apcalc,aribas,autoclass,

I'd like to add that Maxima support formated output when run inside GNU TeXmacs. You get top quality homeworks with really little effort.

That said, I have been feeling that TeX is a bit outdated as a system, but then I discovered TeXmacs. This is a fully wysiwyg editor for TeX, where you type in TeX code and see the formatting instead of the code. I have switched to using it, and would definitely recommend it to others

I use TeXmacs and OpenOffice.org.

AC

The several emacs forks would benifit from being in the same CVS, and possibly even some of the scheme versions of emacs like guile emacs http://gemacs.sourceforge.net/ would benifit from this. (whereas texmacs http://www.texmacs.org/tmweb/home/welcome.en.html would probably not.

If your wondering why i've thought about this so much, It's cause I went through the issue pretty comprehensively a long time ago with the dosemu project, and my again with my (bad) idea for a kernel fork.

Lyx and texmacs is what my university used when creating written material for their math-courses.

I am surprised that no-one has mentioned TeXmacs. Brilliant and powerful. I use emacs for my LaTeX editing, but this is really cool and actively maintained.

Texmacs has a built-in renderer if you don't want to run stuff through LaTeX. It's got links to computer algebra systems --- never used it as I don't do maths any more, but it sounds suspiciously like a Mathematica Light built in to your word processor... and there's even a Windows version.

You can always use it for the mundane stuff and do the fancy stuff by hand later.

Plus, it's not so ugly it makes you want to claw your own eyes out, unlike LyX.

It's really amazing, yeah...

Texmacs.org beats the shit out of all the overbloated words processors; it's small, wysiwyg with dvi quality fonts, the files are stored in text format and it can export to latex, tex, ps. Really, texmacs it the right thing.



"No. This is stupid." -- Linus Torvalds

• Save yourself the burden of typing LaTeX directly, and get a good front-end like LyX. Btw, it can also import existing (not-too-convoluted) LaTeX, just in case you already started writing. TeXmacs could be another option if your book is on a mathematical subject.
• For vectorial diagrams and images, get Sketch and Dia and forget everything else (except perhaps Xfig, which comes handy sometimes). Sketch does a decent job at importing simple PostScript by itself (so you can retouch it), and of course it exports PS and EPS. For importing complex PostScript you may also use it together with pstoedit, which supports the Sketch format natively.
• For graphs and trees have a look at Graphviz, which can generate beautiful outputs (both EPS or bitmapped) from simple textual descriptions of nodes and arcs (and it saves you

You can clearly use WYSIWYG tools with LaTeX: LyX and TeXmacs are just two of them :)

If you want the power of Latex but don't want to have the hassle of learning to write raw Latex, then you could always go for a GUI wrapper around it. Lyx is probably the best for Latex (and I would hate to go and use anything else for generating large cross-referenced documents), but if you are also interested in generating TeX then TeXmacs may well fill the bill.

I'm not a heavy enough user to have a totally valid opinion, but I think TeXmacs is a much less painful way to write LaTeX documents than LyX. Plus it saves to a .tex file, not a .lyx file.

On that note, I would highly recommend Maxima (an open source descendant of MACSYMA) which is quite powerful, and free. Couple it with Texmacs and you've got a system comparable to Maple or Mathematica.

I hear (I haven't tried it myself) that OpenOffice.org has a good equation editor (better than MS Word). Also, there's GNU TeXmacs.

Lisp has one of the best object-oriented paradigm implementation, Meta-Object Protocol among languages with both scripting and bytecompiling capabilities.

Scheme has been proved as a good language for GUI and configuration: GIMP, Sawfish, TeXmacs.

OCaml has all the power as Lips, just in syntax conviniect for many Java/C-poisoned brains to read faster. No wonder there are many real-world applications on it.

Haskell... I just love how it demonstrates that OOP is not everything (and even not enough) :)

Sun works for telecom industry - why not consider Erlang?

And don't ignore Mozart - it's multi-paradigm pradigm might be just what we all will thing as the best in 3-5 years.

The list is not complete, of course. And it's inspired by Functional Programming.

My main point here is: each of above languages, would it be in hands of Sun marketed instead of Java (with all that money invested to), would have quality of implementation much better than Java.

In fact, I am impressed how such poorly designed language as Java succeed so far on the market. It wouldn't without so much money behind. And without so many classes written by Sun to compensate the poor design of the core language itself.

Would Sun invest so much efforts and money to FP language then the result would be much better. Because quality is why FP matters.

TeXmacs!=Emacs. In TeXmacs, WYSIWYG. I just thought I'd mention that, although I must admit my original post was a bit stupid (i.e. 8-year-olds don't yet need the features of LaTeX). Thus, in an attempt to vindicate myself, I'll mention the DebianEdu and Debian Jr. projects. Even if the original poster didn't intend to use Debian, these projects could provide ideas of what to include.