Re: LaTeX widget?

["Sergey I. Panov" <sipan mit edu>]

Hello,

Dirk: 
> On Tue, 17 Mar 1998, I asked about a LaTeX widget. I got a lot of answers
> and good ideas. The fact that I don't want to reinvent the wheel and that
> I have not that much time made me move to the LyX discussion list. Perhaps
> I can help there to provide a gnome frontend when LyX 13.0 is out. 

I hesitated to follow up, but decided to add my comments.

I am using "auctex" package with "emacs" and I am happy with it. I
even tought my 8 years old son to use it for his short school
assignments. I tried Scientific Word (under Windows) and Lyx. Both
have problems that made them usless for me and most of the people I
introduced LaTeX to(my former boss, his secretary and some of my
colleagues).

Lyx and Scientific Word (+)s:
(+) Near correct graphical equation display and GUI for editing
equations.
(+) Text in the editor resemble your final output (if you compare it to
looking at actual LaTeX file)

Scientific Word specific (+)s:
(+) Uses both LaTeX2.09 and LaTeX2e files as its native format.
(+) Supports BibTeX for references.

LyX specific (+)s:
(+) One can type LaTeX commands (at least in math mode) instead of
choosing them in the menu.

Scientific Word specific (-)s:
(-) Uses its own additional package with every LaTeX2e style class.
(-) Impossible to define and use macros.
(-) Impossible to view and edit actual LaTeX commands.
(-) Little things like single directory in the BibTeX path, ... .

LyX specific (-)s:
1) Has its own internal format that can be saved as LaTeX file, but
import does not work.
(-) Does not support BibTeX (last time I checked).
(-) Allows entering native LaTeX commands but can not display raw LaTeX
text as it does not have one).

Scientific Word and LyX (-)s:
(-) LaTeX based/oriented while the same approach can me used with any
format from the STML family.(That is probably irrelevant for authors
and users of SW)

"Emacs Rules!" Well it does looks like that emacs has power to become
LyX/"Scientific Word" for virtually and parsable format. Just add, for
example, special display mode and a equation editing dialogs to
auctex. Well real emacs does not support graphics yet(or does it
already), but I know that code for displaying equations in emacs is
done already. What emacs(real one) lacks is a nice GUI, but may be
gnomacs(CORBA, guile aware and with nice docable, dynamic buttonbars)
is not such an impossible thing.

> As far as I have seen from the mailing list archive at the lyx site the
> port of LyX to kde is not very welcome. The most developers are
> disapointed of the behavior of Matthias Ettrich. Perhaps this gives a
> shift towards 13.0. Gtk was mentioned as a possible reference
> implementation.

Matthias Ettrich is amasing guy. I admire him for his achivements. He
definitely one of the "legendary" hackers of today. But, like RMS, he
has a PR problem. He managed to start and get going two succesefull
software projects -- LyX and KDE (BTW, both based on semi-free
toolkits), abandoned his first baby (LyX) and devote himself to a
"family" of great KDE programs, then he comes back and grabs his
abandoned chiled from its new found parents and takes it in to a new
"family"(KDE). That is not my analogy, that is how LyX mainainer sees
it. I just hope they will settle their differences over time.
>From the practical point of view nothing terrible has happend -- one
non-free toolkit was replaced by another non-free(but freer) toolkit.



Sorry for waisying the bandwidth.

 Sergey