Re: equation editors and TeX (long) (was "Equation Editor")

[Federico Mena Quintero <federico helixcode com>]

Paul Topping <PaulT@mathtype.com> writes:

> Martin,
> 
> I had know way of knowing that your comments were made in ignorance of the
> fact that my comany makes the Equation Editor that comes with MS Word, as
> well as MathType, its parent product. Actually, a lot of your comments seem
> to indicate that you didn't read my original post where, among other things,
> I stated that directly.
[snip]

If someone is telling you "Abiword is technically better than
Microsoft Word" please feel free to ignore that
moron^H^H^H^H^Hopinionated person with extreme prejudice.

We appreciate your suggestions very much.  In the GNOME team we are
fortunate to have a few people who are neurotic about typographic
quality, myself included.  Having feedback from someone who has
actually sat down and written an equation editor is a good thing; it
will save us some thinking down the way.

You may want to define some IDL interfaces for doing fine typography
when embedding things in documents.  This would be very useful to us
as we can then architect other typography-conscious programs, such as
a word processor, in such way that they will handle these interfaces
properly.

Unfortunately we currently don't have a sophisticated page layout
engine or word processor functional enough to just drop in these
interfaces.  I don't know how much has Bonobo been integrated into
Abiword, so I don't know if its code base is a good starting point for
this work.  In the unfortunate case that it weren't, I'm sure you
could whip up some reasonable wrapper test program that will typeset a
few paragraphs, possibly using Raph Levien's libhnj for fine
typography as a backend, and embed some equations into them.

> - Very often, but not always, TeX users that say they tried our
> point-and-click equation editors spent 15 minutes working with them. Whereas
> we claim that our equation editors are easier to use than TeX, we never
> claim there is no learning curve. All software takes some effort to learn.
> 
> - The "baby duck" syndrome often comes into play here. (Whatever the baby
> duck sees first is its mother, by definition.) After spending a few months
> to become reasonably proficient at TeX (please lets not argue over how long
> it takes), the TeX user finds it hard to imagine making equations any other
> way.

Hard-core TeX users are like hard-core old Unix fogeys who have wet
dreams of write-only, unreadable shell scripts.

OK, maybe not.  The former ones actually have some good typographic
taste.

I don't think the TeX equation language is hard to learn.  Once you
know it, it is actually pretty damn good.  It has a terseness and
flexibility that people learn to appreciate.

It is just that it is a pain in the ass to compile your TeX file, look
at it in some crappy DVI viewer, and have to tweak it endlessly.

A WYSIWYG equation editor is nice in that it lets you avoid the
edit/compile/view cycle.  Assuming you have a good typsetting core, it
all comes down to user interface issues.  These are complex and are
unfortunately not yet a solved problem like the TeX core is.

(In my personal opinion LaTeX is a pile of smelly unusable ugly macro
dung.  Note that I am talking about the LaTeX macros, not about the
TeX core for which I have deep respect and admiration.)

> When a user is typing along in MS Word and wants to type an equation, they
> have to invoke the equation editor. The first time this is done by going to
> the Insert menu, choosing "Microsoft Equation Editor", then clicking OK to
> insert an empty equation and enter equation editing mode. At this point, the
> typical TeX person throws up his or her hands and exclaims disgustingly, "I
> can't do all this every time I want to enter an equation. This is
> ridiculous."

This is a GUI issue and thus can be fixed through user testing and
feedback.  I agree that the Word interface for equations is rather
clunky.

> The reason MS Word works the way it does (I believe) is that the Insert
> Object feature (and OLE in general) is designed around inserting big things.
> Excel spreadsheets, to be more precise. If you are going into edit mode on a
> big thing, the document jumping around, and toolbars disappearing and others
> appearing is no big deal. For entering math, it is totally bonkers.

You make a good point.  Do you have any ideas about how this could be
improved?

> Like my earlier posting, this is offered in the hope that you guys can do
> better. If you all think the input of someone that has spent quite a few
> years thinking about this subject isn't useful, I can live with that.

You may want to play around writing some IDL so that we can get ideas
from it.  An implementation would be awesome :-)

  Federico