On Tue, Jul 10, 2001 at 10:13:30AM +0200, Rainer Dorsch wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> I am just wondering, if there are any suggestions to Question 5 of
>
> http://www.texmacs.org/Web/FAQ.html
>
I've made them to Mr. van der Hoeven directly as can be seen in a copy
of that email here:
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>From [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tue Jul 10 14:26:29 2001
Date: Tue, 10 Jul 2001 14:26:29 -0400
From: Zvezdan Petkovic <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: Joris van der Hoeven <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: TeXmacs advantages over LyX list
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Dear Mr. van der Hoeven,
I have come across a Web page for TeXmacs and in the FAQ section you
state the advantages of TeXmacs over LyX as follows below. I have put my
comments in between.
1. TeXmacs is fully WYSIWYG.
I hope you will accept that this is a matter of taste. What's an
advantage for one person is a disadvantage for another. In my
opinion this is merely a feature that some people might prefer.
Still, for such people, this is an acceptable claim.
2. TeXmacs has a professional typesetting quality and nicer fonts.
The meaning of this is not quite clear to me. LyX uses TeX for
typesetting. Are you claiming that you are producing better and more
professional printed output than TeX?
If you are referring to rendering on the screen than I wish you
have used that word instead. The word "typesetting" refers to a
printed media (still).
But even that claim is not so strong to me. Who has nicer fonts
obviously depends on which fonts are installed on a system.
XFree86 4.x has brought us an anti-aliased rendering engine of a
very good quality. Is yours better? Can you show True Type fonts
too?
teTeX provides all nice fonts in a Type1 format, and hence
available for rendering under X too. Thus, any Type1 and TrueType
font (including teTeX ones) can be rendered in LyX (or any other X
application) through the regular X mechanism. Qt supports
anti-aliasing through X in an excellent way and it looks really
great in native KDE applications. I hope GTK will do the same in the
near future. LyX will soon support both of these toolkits (although
there is a KLyX already).
I do not consider seriously Metafont fonts since they are ugly,
starting with Computer Modern. Euler is a notable exception because
it was designed by Herman Zapf, of course. But it's available as
Type1 font in teTeX too.
The importance of using Type1 cannot be overemphasised since it
is the only way to produce a decent PDF. I hope you'll agree that
the ability to produce a good looking PDF is the most important
feature of any typesetting program nowadays.
To conclude: Can TeXmacs do typesetting better than TeX and
rendering of Type1 and TrueType fonts better than Freetype X module?
If not, this claim is invalid.
3. TeXmacs comes with the Guile/Scheme extension language.
4. You can use TeXmacs as an interface to computer algebra systems.
These are real advantages for people who need them.
Finally, what are the disadvantages of your program. Well, take a look
at your own list of suggestions -- they'll be quite obvious (no floats,
no two columns, ...). Besides, you are using a non-standard format with
still imperfect conversion _to_ LaTeX. That is quite unacceptable to any
scientist. Non-scientists will use something Word-like anyway. You do
not support Docbook SGML DTD, also. Future is in XML, MathML, etc.
I do respect your work and I believe that putting a sincere list of
advantages and disadvantages would be really beneficial for it.
Yours sincerely,
--
Zvezdan Petkovic <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
http://www.cs.wm.edu/~zvezdan/
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--
Zvezdan Petkovic <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
http://www.cs.wm.edu/~zvezdan/
