Why go on with LaTeX front-ends? Because of LaTeX! [LWN.net]

Why go on with LaTeX front-ends? Because of LaTeX!

Posted Jun 7, 2002 8:16 UTC (Fri) by DeletedUser1713 ((unknown), #1713)
In reply to: Why go on with LaTeX front-ends? by DeletedUser1650
Parent article: LyX 1.2.0 released

There are a few reasons why LaTeX remains prevalent: it is a human-readable established document interchange format, there are loads of available existing solutions for numerous tasks, there is a host of available expertise available.

Both of LyX and TeXmacs don't address this properly IMO: both don't use LaTeX as their external format, both have to export and particularly to import into their own system, and the reexport does not properly reflect the input again. This makes both of them unsuitable for interchange of documents with others: you can not receive one version of a document and send the author a version with a few corrections in it.

The basic design difference between LyX and TeXmacs is the choice of WYSIWYG: TeXmacs' input window is the same as its print output, LyX' isn't.

The disadvantage of this choice for LyX is of course lack of immediate visual feedback. The advantage is that line wrapping, colors, markup of text elements and structures and the choice of screen fonts can be chosen for maximum editing convenience instead of having to reflect the printed output. It is somewhat ironic that the font defaults for LyX do not exploit this possibility: they default to fonts not designed for screen display. My Emacs source buffers are more legible. Also LyX overdoes a few things unnecessarily: like with TeXmacs, inserting text into existing justified paragraphs leads to the distractive concertina effect where a line shrinks on entry until the display engine decides to rewrap the paragraph, and this happens for about every word.

A disadvantage of both systems is massive reinvention of the wheel: apart from implementing their WYSIWYG paradigms, the systems also have to provide editing features. Over the time, literally thousands of editors were created for Free systems. Very few have prevailed. Those that did have received several man decades of development. Just like starting from scratch with regard to the typesetting, starting from scratch with regard to the editing is something which only makes limited sense.

Another disadvantage of both systems is that they have to reimplement every feature available in LaTeX just for the sake of editing. They can in some manner export LaTeX they don't understand (ERT in LyX, conditional LaTeX in TeXmacs), but editing it becomes inconvenient. That is, both systems are not really LaTeX frontends, but merely export to it. With TeXmacs, this is a design decision, with LyX I would more tend to call it a historical accident: LyX at the beginning was intended to be a frontend to LaTeX.

Personally, I am main developer of a system called preview-latex which is used in conjunction with Emacs editing modes. It merely focuses on providing WYSIWYG display of selected and identifiable compositions (math text, figures, section headers, included graphics per default). Both the selection and identification is done by LaTeX, so the system does not get confused easily by intricate TeX programming and is easily extensible. The system does not interfere with normal LaTeX source editing and does not touch the text, merely changes the way in which it is displayed.

It is for that reason entirely suitable for copy editing and document interchange. I have repeatedly been asserted that "merely" the visual feedback offered by this system has been sufficient to cause Windows users to switch to Emacs (XEmacs in this case because GNU Emacs still lacks a released version supporting inline images under Windows) and even to convert vi users. Since it does not obstruct either access to the power of LaTeX nor of Emacs, it saves itself some reinvention of the wheel and makes it likable to power users.

Since the acceptance of this experiment suggests that far less intrusive amounts of WYSIWYG with a focus merely on the display can also be successful, in the long term it would be beneficial if the display engine related handling of TeX typesetting (font handling, line wrapping, page breaking) were abstracted into libraries in such a way as to make them ubiquitous. Ultimately, there is no sense in systems like LyX, TeXmacs, Abiword, OpenWrite and the like all to implement their own versions of math editing, math display, font handling, user interface and so on from scratch. I hope that this may be one aspect that future development from the Omega project might lead to.

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