Re: [Texmacs-dev] major barrier to adoption

[Henri Lesourd]

Jeremy Henty wrote:

> I certainly  don't want  to appear  to be  speaking on
> behalf of  the TeXmacs  devs.
The point is : as far as I know (I am only *one*
among many other contributors), TeXmacs devs are
not really interested in displacing LaTeX anymore,
because its a neverending job, and there are much
more interesting things to develop with TeXmacs
than trying to clone perfectly an old-fashioned
system, even if it is LaTeX.

At least for myself, this is 100% my approach
to the LaTeX compatibility problem : forget
it ! ;-), and I know this is somehow also
the approach of other developers (but I'm
not them, thus I cannot develop more precisely).


> I believe  maths publishers  are often
> quite  strict about  what macro  packages they  will accept,  so their
> requirements could  be starting point for identifying  a useful "clean
> LaTeX".
>
>
>  
By the way, that's the problem : publishers *enforce*
the use of a given set of LaTeX style files. But they
take null account of the cleanness of the implementation
of their style files, nor do they provide access from
other editing software.

Would they simply accept PDF documents, for example,
all the problems we discuss would not exist at all.


Another approach which would solve the problem would
be to implement a TeXmacs version of the style files
for each journal.

We know we could do this since a *very long time*,
but given the lack of interest from the publishers,
because from their point of view, moving is a cost,
which brings no benefits (except the comfort of the
authors : but they don't care, the "monopoly-like"
position of LaTeX crushes the dissenting voices
sufficiently efficiently), we need either :

-> complaints from the authors to the publishers,
  in such a way that these publishers are forced
  to move ;

-> contributions from the users, to reimplement
  the styles of all the journals inside TeXmacs ;


But given the fact that none of the two possibilities
above has ever been really feasible in the past,
we have to acknowledge that there is not a real
interest in the community (at large) for improving
the LaTeX toolchain.

To me, it seems that whether we like it or not, this
is somehow a fact. Thus, looking for other directions
to develop TeXmacs is the sensible approach, it seems.


Best, Henri