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Comment by mustardants199 | Hacker News Reader

While the process of using TeX/LaTeX can be complex and require trial and error, combining multiple packages and customizing templates, the end result is high quality documents that feel like they could not have been produced any other way, and ultimately bring a sense of satisfaction and accomplishment to the user.

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It is not clear what this comment would like to add. The presupposition that no other software can equal or surpass some magic powers of TeX/LaTeX has nothing to do with technical merit. Indeed I guess most users cannot distinguish a document produced with TeXmacs or with LaTeX. For example all these papers: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2212.05584.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2112.05562.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2210.15047.pdf have been typesetted directly with TeXmacs with no intervention of LaTeX whatsoever. What use cases do you have in mind to support your claim?

ps: it is clear that TeX is a complete typesetting language, but not a format. So TeXmacs need to be compared with some restricted set of LaTeX packages. The goals for the program is to deliver the user from the burden to be an expert to be able to compose beautiful and rich technical documents. But I would disagree that the ultimate goal of a system like TeX/LaTeX is to satisfy the 0.01% of hackers which enjoy spending their times coding in an obscure macro language (which is fun, I know, like composing documents directly writing PostScript programs). TeX was made to make possible beautiful typesetting and TeXmacs carry on this vision and philosophy, so in this sense the name is fitting.

>It is not clear what this comment would like to add.

Maybe yet another one that misunderstood due to name that TeXmacs is about TeX, and then proceed to praise TeX. Then must rejoice because TeXmacs can produce equally high quality documents without the complexity, trial and error, package combination, etc.

Maybe it's time to change "TeXmacs" (which has little to do with, apart from taking an inspiration from, TeX or emacs), to... you guessed it!.. "TheJollyWriter".

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