On Mon, 2005-11-28 at 18:27 +0100, Henri Lesourd wrote:
Yes, but for beginners it makes sense. I had this problem
with people who didn't knew TeXmacs at all (and were supposed
to input formulas, most of the time), and it worked perfectly,
much better than having to tell them in the first place "TeXmacs
is a very nice mathematical editor BUT, bla bla bla".
The problem is that the way the typesetter works in math mode is
different from how it works in text mode. There's a reason why it's a
mathematics mode, and not consolidated with the text mode. The main
reason is that character layout is not the same in each mode.
Mathematical formulas demand over-and-under, stretching braces,
superscripts, fractions, integration signs, etc. that do not appear in
normal paragraph text. On the other hand, blocks of text require
line-filling to find an optimal number of words per line so that there's
not too much space between words and not too many hyphens, and page
breaking. The other thing is that keyboarding a mathematical expression
is different from keyboarding a paragraph of text. There needs to be a
much more sophisticated key-map during mathematical input. When you
type * in text, you want to see it, but in mathematics, you want the
implicit multiplication, unless you want the x or the . sign, in which
case you type the * then push Tab a few times.