Re: [Texmacs-dev] major barrier to adoption

[Karl Winterling]

In my (rather limited, I admit) experience, most math people at my school (Berkeley) use LaTeX because one can easily download self-installing executables for LaTeX.  Although Macintoshes tend to enjoy more popularity, most (at least to my knowledge) students and professors don't seem all that interested in computers and don't want the trouble of setting up Fink.

I've also heard a lot of criticism directed at LaTeX (inconsistent syntax, unhelpful user manuals, bad interface for composition, etc).

On Jan 11, 2008 11:01 AM, Henri Lesourd < address@hidden> wrote:

Amir Michail wrote:

>And see point #1 here (provides evidence of peer pressure):
>
>
>

Yes, yes, there is peer pressure.

But as I said, it's not a major barrier to adoption
of TeXmacs, it's a major barrier to adoption *as a
replacement for LaTeX*.

But TeXmacs is very much used, and a big part
of its use (more than 50%, I would say) is on
its own, for the pure sake of writing documents,
not for generating LaTeX.


On the other hand, part of the criticism of
the guy is understandable, especially :

a. There is no complete emulation of LaTeX
  inside TeXmacs (although nobody really
  has time to implement that : but for
  heavy LaTeX users, it is a problem) ;

b. The TeXmacs markup is not very well
  editable in simple editors like emacs,
  it looks much more like XML.

  Although... of course you can export
  your document to LaTeX, work on it
  in emacs, and reimport it later in
  TeXmacs, it works perfectly. But people
  are perhaps not sufficiently informed
  about this ;

c. Remains the non-availability of the LaTeX
  styles problem, but this one will solve
  itself with time, I guess...

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