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Why go on with LaTeX front-ends?Why go on with LaTeX front-ends?Posted Jun 7, 2002 3:40 UTC (Fri) by DeletedUser1677 ((unknown), #1677)In reply to: Why go on with LaTeX front-ends? by DeletedUser1650 Parent article: LyX 1.2.0 released The reason to go on with LaTeX front ends is the same reason to go on with using ASCII text files; in fact it is the same reason to use Fortran instead of ADA, and C instead of Haskell. The propellor-head "new and improved abstraction" ways of doing things almost universally offer nothing to the end user (that is to say, me, the scientist who actually uses both LyX and TeXmacs to generate LaTeX output, LaTeX being the lingua franca of peer reviewed journals in the hard sciences). We don't care if the way TeXmacs works internally lights the jets of some computer propellorhead if it doesn't generate crisp, utile LaTeX output. LaTeX output is pretty much the only reason to use such tools. LyX is actually pretty good at doing that. TeXmacs presently isn't, and lacks even the rudiments of the amount of documentation necessary to make it useful or even usable by the average schnook. It has some features which are much better than those in LyX (for example, its interaction with Maxima), but you presently can't use the thing easily enough to take advantage of these features; and some of TeXmacs (the bibliography features for instance) simply doesn't work at all. The fact that it isn't LaTeX internally is not presently an advantage of TeXmacs, possibly excepting for the people who write code for it. People who use LyX almost exclusively come from the technical and scientific community; and we use it for the LaTeX output. We don't care about the "next great thing" in how the program represents data internally -the only reason TeXmacs is useful at all is its LaTeX compatabilities.
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