Do we need a WYSIWYG editor for Tex, LaTex, and AmsTex?
Tags: Latex, Lyx, Scientific Word, TexPosted in Technical (ms word, tex), Tips, useful software
I still remember in the 1980′s how impressed we physicists were when we discovered Tex. The program was written by Donald Knuth. The macro package Tex is so good and complete that all new developments are mere front ends and user interfaces to Tex, of which Latex and AmsTex packages are the most popular. Newer distributions deal with newer hardware, new fonts and better font management, and pdf creation, but the fundament is still Tex.
Those scientists, like chemists and biologists, that use an occasional mathematical formula can do without Tex. All kinds of handy add-ins allow incorporating math formula’s in standard office documents. However, if your paper has many math formula’s the Tex-way is the only solution. In the rest I will limit myself to LaTex.Compiling
A typical Latex cycle is a source code ascii file (extension usually .tex) that is compiled by a “latex” program into a dvi (device independent file) that subsequently can be viewed or printed. The learning curve for LaTex is quite long. Opponents of the Tex-approach always complain about the lack of a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor. They are used to MS Word, or alike, with a powerful Graphical User Interface (GUI). I am not going to start a discussion here about whether or not WYSIWYG and GUI’s is the best way. My opinion is that I agree with the Unix world that a graphical user interface and a WYSIWYG approach is in general inefficient for experienced users.
A typical Latex cycle is a source code ascii file (extension usually .tex) that is compiled by a “latex” program into a dvi (device independent file) that subsequently can be viewed or printed. The learning curve for LaTex is quite long. Opponents of the Tex-approach always complain about the lack of a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor. They are used to MS Word, or alike, with a powerful Graphical User Interface (GUI). I am not going to start a discussion here about whether or not WYSIWYG and GUI’s is the best way. My opinion is that I agree with the Unix world that a graphical user interface and a WYSIWYG approach is in general inefficient for experienced users.
Math from a scratch?
A typical LaTex source file looks horrible for inexperienced users. To give an example:
\[ \int_0^\infty \sum_{l=0}^\infty\frac{ A_l ({\bf x})}{2 \pi}\]
will generate the formula:
A typical LaTex source file looks horrible for inexperienced users. To give an example:
\[ \int_0^\infty \sum_{l=0}^\infty\frac{ A_l ({\bf x})}{2 \pi}\]
will generate the formula:
Some of my students really develop math using the LaTex. I find this very difficult. What I often do is: use a pen write math, correct it, and correct it, and correct it, and then put it in LaTex.
If we would have a good WYSIWYG editor we would be able to develop math immediately from scratch into a usable tex file.
Requirements for a WYSIWYG LaTex editor
- The GUI interface should be user friendly, and compiling and printing should be transparent to the user. The help system should focus on how to use the editor, not on explaining LaTex, because enough good documentation exist for that.
- An acceptable WYSIWYG editor would have to be backward and forward compatible: that is to say it should be able to import LaTex files from any old or new Latex version.
- It should be able to export clean LaTex files, that is without relying on macros not being part of the standard LaTex distribution.
- If not open source, the licensing should be reasonable
Requirements 2 and 3 will allow authors to switch between any editor they like. Some co-authors might want to use the WYSIWG interface, others might want to use of the raw ascii interface.
The only two WYSIWYG editors for LaTeX I know of are the open sourceLyx and the commercial Windows program Scientific Word sold by software company MacKichan.
Lyx
Lyx is open source with a Unix taste, and as it is free users should hold back with their complaints. Well, Lyx is horrible. At least on Windows. In my case the install procedure hung time after time on missing LaTex packages. The documentation is awful, unclear, scattered, inconsistent, ugly .. The printing of a document is terrible. Apparently it helps when you install Cygwin, a Unix-environment for Windows. So Lyx violates my requirement 1. It also violates requirement 2, as I tested it with at least ten bona-fide LaTex files, that were accepted by scientific journals in the past. In all cases Lyx could not handle therm and told me there were fatal errors in them. The Lyx people advise to write papers specially for the Lyx system and indeed Lyx stores the Latex information in a non-Latex file. Horrible.
Lyx is open source with a Unix taste, and as it is free users should hold back with their complaints. Well, Lyx is horrible. At least on Windows. In my case the install procedure hung time after time on missing LaTex packages. The documentation is awful, unclear, scattered, inconsistent, ugly .. The printing of a document is terrible. Apparently it helps when you install Cygwin, a Unix-environment for Windows. So Lyx violates my requirement 1. It also violates requirement 2, as I tested it with at least ten bona-fide LaTex files, that were accepted by scientific journals in the past. In all cases Lyx could not handle therm and told me there were fatal errors in them. The Lyx people advise to write papers specially for the Lyx system and indeed Lyx stores the Latex information in a non-Latex file. Horrible.Scientific Word
Scientific Word is much better than Lyx. Requirement 1 is fulfilled and requirement 2 is also fulfilled. Requirement 3 is only partly fulfilled. Rather than removing all SciWord stuff when cleanly exporting, it comments their own directives out in the source file. In addition it rearranges the LaTex original file. Moreover users that import a file, do not change it, and export it again will discover that it does not compile anymore because the proprietary file tcilatex.tex is needed. This is the wrong way. The SciWord developers should have developed a standard Latex package, perhaps call tcilatex and made it part of any Latex distribution.
Scientific Word is much better than Lyx. Requirement 1 is fulfilled and requirement 2 is also fulfilled. Requirement 3 is only partly fulfilled. Rather than removing all SciWord stuff when cleanly exporting, it comments their own directives out in the source file. In addition it rearranges the LaTex original file. Moreover users that import a file, do not change it, and export it again will discover that it does not compile anymore because the proprietary file tcilatex.tex is needed. This is the wrong way. The SciWord developers should have developed a standard Latex package, perhaps call tcilatex and made it part of any Latex distribution.
I have uses SciWord a lot, but I am about to abandon it because of its licensing conditions. It is way too expensive, $525 for academic use and $180 for students. Happily one of my affiliations has a site-wide license. However, the licensing scheme is cumbersome. It is connected to one computer and it is per year. I use it on four computers. So every three months one is expiring, without issuing a warning. It always happens to me in a weekend or on a conference and then I am out of working program.
My Solution
My solution is the fountain pen again. I write my math. After it is done I use the WinEdt ascii editor with the MixTexdistribution as backend. It is fast and robust.
My solution is the fountain pen again. I write my math. After it is done I use the WinEdt ascii editor with the MixTexdistribution as backend. It is fast and robust.
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