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GNU TeXmacs and Structured Text Editing
Joris van der Hoeven writes "It is a common belief that structured texts are best conceived using ASCII-based text editors like Emacs or VI. It is true that word processors like MS-Word have done a bad job on this issue. But does this mean that wysiwyg structured text editing would be impossible? We firmly believe the contrary and
argue
that such editors are both technically conceivable and desirable. Judge for yourself by taking a look at the GNU TeXmacs
program, whose version 1.0 has just been released."
Good question. LyX is great. I wrote a book typeset directly from LyX-LaTeX-PDF.
Judging from the screen shots on the web site, TeXmacs is more oriented to mathematical writing while LyX is more for general typesetting. The TeXmacs icons on the tool bar also suggests this.
But TeX enthusiasts seem to be stuck on the idea that Tex is also useful for structured documents. Sorry, it just isn't. If you want to impose structure on a document, you can't use a format designed around layout. Even if you add constructs that describe document structure (as LaTeX does) you can't prevent the user from using non-structure elements "because it looks right". So you end up with a convoluted mixture of structure and layout that's impossible to maintain. That's why HTML is such a mess. That's why maintaining large technical documents with traditional word processors is a nightmare.
If you need to maintain a large structured document, you need to use a format that makes no attempt at all to describe layout. So the writer is forced to think purely in terms of how the document is organized. You keep layout description in a separate thing, a "style sheet". Not only does that end your document maintainence nightmare, but it allows you to deliver the same document in different ways just by providing the appropriate style sheet. You have a single source that's accessible as a set of web page, or as a printed document, or whatever.
What formats am I talking about? Since this is 2002, I'm talking about XML. Not XML in general (most XML apps are data-centric not doc-centric) but specific appropriate XML applications, such as DocBook or DITA. For the stylesheets there's Cascading Style Sheets and/or XSL. But these are just the best technologies that happen to available now. The basic idea has been around for a long time: in structured documents you have to separate markup and layout.
I think this GNU thing suffers from the same problems as LyX, Scientific Workplace, and every other GUI front-end to (La)TeX -- it relies on menus and the mouse.
In the time it takes someone to remove his hand from the keyboard, search through a menu or click a button to make a fraction, and search through another menu or palette to find a gamma, I could have typed \frac{\gamma}{2} ten times.
My experience has been that people look to these things so they don't have to be bothered by knowing all the commands. I think that's a waste of time. After writing one paper using LaTeX, you will have memorized all of the symbols commonly used in your discipline, and you'll soon discover that LaTeX is so much faster than a GUI application.
Spending a couple of hours learning LaTeX is time well spent, and you will certainly be repaid many times over in the long run.
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
You miss the fact that more often that not, /gets in the way/. I'm writing content,
WYSIWYG
I expect and need LaTeX to handle the
presentation. WYSIWYM is not an "excuse", it's a
definite feature. In LyX, when I'm editing
a document, I see what I need to see and
nothing more. Where page breaks happen, thanks
to LaTeX, is irrelevant for 99% of the editing
I do. I don't want to be distracted by that.
LyX is equally customisable too.
-- Remove the trailing '\0' to email me.