What is Reddit's opinion of
TeXmacs?
From 3.5 billion Reddit comments
11 reviews of this app found across Reddit:
It is really a personal choice. If you don't like LaTeX, but you like the style, you can try and use TexMacs, as the web page says GNU TeXmacs is a free wysiwyw (what you see is what you want) editing platform with special features for scientists. It uses its own Reference manager, so Mendeley would be of no use (although you can export your Mendeley library and use it with the program).
If you really want to use Mendeley, you should stick to either MS Word or Libreoffice. I don't really know if Pages is compatible with Mendeley, but it tends to crash too often for my taste anyway... Keep in mind that MS Word tends to become incredibly unreliable with documents over 100 pages, and it can really mess your figures and tables, so you may have to split your thesis into individual chapters...
As OrbitalPete suggested, you can use Adobe InDesign or Scribus afterwards to format text and figures... Lot of extra work, but well worth the quality results.
Besides LaTeX, on Linux you also have some other free choices, such as groff and Lout. Like LaTeX, these are essentially markup languages, i.e. you write code in plain text then compile that to some format like PDF or PostScript. Groff is included with every Linux distribution, and Lout is available in most Linux package repositories (e.g. in Fedora you'd just run "yum install lout" as root).
Groff has about the same learning curve as LaTeX (and produces slightly better looking output, in my opinion), while Lout is a bit easier to learn. Here is a comparison of groff and LaTeX with their default settings, and here is a pic showing how they can be made to look very similar (without saying which is which).
If you're looking for something with a GUI, besides LyX there's also TeXmacs. Both of those are available in most Linux distros.
I'm not sure what you mean with the same. What I can judge is that the output is of the same quality, at least. Then as I said TeXmacs tried to improve in some features, like placement of indexes. I think that there are some features like protrusion typical of the microtypographical enhancement to TeX present too. And overall there is no reason any missing feature could be added in the future. What it provides on top of the same quality, is interactivity and WYSIWYG, meaning you do not have to have two windows open on the same laptop but you work directly on the typeset document. Synthetic fonts looks surprisingly ok, check for example this paper: http://www.texmacs.org/joris/fontart/fontart-abs.html
> I have been reading about latex on here for a while. I'm not sure what it is, but a quick google search did not make it look very simple.
LaTeX is not that simple if you're used to using a word processor. While I agree with the sentiment of people here recommending LaTeX -- and I use it myself almost every day -- I think in your case it may be overkill. There are simpler alternatives. Someone else already mentioned one of them (LyX). There's also TeXmacs. In most Linux distros it's available through the package manager repositories, and there's also a Windows version. It's about a 30MB download, and unlike LyX it does not depend on having a LaTeX system installed.
>However that aside, main question is: is there a way to represent math quickly in a text format and have it display like it would if written manually on paper?
This suggestion is entirely unrelated to Emacs, so if you are set on using Emac for this, just ignore this comment.
There is a program inspired by Emacs and TeX but otherwise unrelated to both called, confusingly enough, TeXmacs.
Here's a video showing math input: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqjgN_KNHgM
And here's a manual section about math entry:
http://www.texmacs.org/tmweb/manual/webman-math.en.html
You'd need to learn some shortcuts to be proficient in it, but it can be pretty fast. Alt-f is for writing a fraction, or Alt-s for square roots. You can also use some Tex-isms, such as writing \frac and \sqrt which will work the same as the shortcuts.
Math typography is quite subtle, especially if you are uncompromising on quality. That is also a reason many people stick with TeX (which was written by a mathematician/computer scientist, not a programmer). TeXmacs is also written (mainly) by professional mathematician and used daily. Even if I look to the browser environment, and somehow the underlying technology is not very important, fashion is not an index of quality. If it was easy to build a high quality math typesetting system on the top of a browser it would already have been done. There are subtle problems, like that you need to override the build-in typesetter, because you need more control. This means you cannot use standard HTML (see e.g. what MathJax does). This renders all the browser technology non appropriate for the task. I do not see any tool based on MathML which is worth considering, for example. Even Mathematica does not have high quality math typesetting. I'm not sure what you mean by 'modern'. I think you mistake the technology of the implementation with the functionality. But I would like to be proven wrong. So I look forward to it.
ps: as an example, consider micro typography (i.e. the small changes in spacing required for correct positioning of math notation: http://www.texmacs.org/tmweb/images/texmacs-micro-typography.png )
If you go to the URL in the book, it has the source and on this page it says
>Textbook was created on an open source word processer designed for equations called TexMacs. You will need to download the program from http://www.texmacs.org/ to edit the documents.
- [original post](/r/science/comments/5zrqn/gnu_texmacs_a_scientific_editing_platform_pdf/)
- poster: [amichail](/u/amichail)
- sub: [/r/science](/r/science)
- score: 12
- comments: 11
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This is also, in some extends, what TeXmacs allows you to do. In math mode, one can obtain the symbols from in different ways. A clear description is given in this article, Section 3.
For instance alpha can be printed with \alpha (as in LaTeX)or with a Tab (so you press a and then some variants are obtained by pressing Tab several times, alpha is the first one).
Likewise, ℂ is obtained by pressing C C and while ⊆ is obtained by pressing < = Tab Tab. First, < = yields the lesser or equal symbol, then pressing Tab a first time you have a variant thereof, pressing Tab a second time yields the ⊆ symbol (\subseteq is still an option, as well).
Since it hasn't been mentioned yet, I'm a fan of TeXmacs. The formula editing tools are fast and intuitive (with both good keyboard shortcuts and menus), and the underlying markup language is cleaner than TeX (you can convert it to (La)TeX if you need to).