Latex, Mathematica, and journals
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From: Murray Eisenberg on 17 May 2010 07:11 There is a sort of WYSIWYG interface for LaTeX: the cross-platform LyX. It's really a whole new document processing system that provides a front end to LaTeX as the underlying typesetting engine (and allows direct entry of LaTeX mark-up). Which means you'd have to learn a whole lot of new ways of doing things. Win some, lose some. By its very nature, LaTeX cannot be a true WYSIWIG system. Its design requires that you enter mark-up code that then is processed by the TeX engine itself to produce typeset output. And that engine has to digest much, or all, of the input in order to figure out where to break lines, how much extra space to slip in between words or characters, how much extra space to insert between lines to fill out the page, and where to break pages. Another impediment to WYSIWYG is that many if not most LaTeX users rely upon loading packages, from the very common amsmath to specialized packages for changing layouts and formats of headers/footers, allowing multiple columns within parts of the document, etc.; such packages are typically controlled by one or even many separate options you specify when you load the package. (There's a whole large book devoted just to such packages, "The LaTeX Companion".) So how could a LaTeX front end know about all such packages? And how could it implement their use through WYSIWIG methods? Two things towards WYSIWYG for LaTeX are possible: (1) A front end that helps you create the necessary mark-up; and (2) a really fast viewer that typesets as you proceed (but necessarily must change the output as more of the document is created) and from which you can readily do reverse-search from the typeset view back to the .tex source. There are a couple of front ends that make writing and processing LaTeX much easier for somebody who's not using it all the time. They combine palette-driven input of math structures and symbols along with menu-driven structuring of the document, yet introduce no new paradigms (such as the ones for LyX). The cross-platform Texmaker is one such. For Windows, there's TeXnicCenter (part of the proTeXt bundle built upon the MiKTeX distribution), and WinEdt (which can interface to MiKTeX, TeX Live, and Y & Y TeX). For Mac OS-X there's TeXShop (with the MacTeX bundle built upon the TeX Live distribution). Viewing speeds after typesetting varies with these front ends. All can do reverse-search. For Windows, too, there's the proprietary BaKoMa system, which provides essentially synchronized viewing of source as you typeset and even allows you to type text directly into the viewer window. Aside from LyX, this is probably the closest you can come today to WYSIWYG for LaTEX. On the Mac, for sheer speed of essentially simultaneous typesetting and viewing, nothing can touch proprietary Blue Sky "Textures". However, I believe Textures although as far as I can recall, it included no editor with the kind of palettes and structuring menus common to the front ends mentioned above. Moreover, there seems to have been no further development of Textures in the last few years, and I don't know whether it works with current OS-X or is kept up to date with current TeX distributions. On 5/16/2010 5:56 AM, S. B. Gray wrote: > Can anyone tell me why there is no WYSIWYG interface for Latex? > Any time I want to publish a paper I have to relearn it again, since I > publish rarely. > > I would gladly use MS Word if the math journals would accept it. > > And is there any movement to accepting Mathematica output, properly formatted? > > Steve Gray > -- Murray Eisenberg murray(a)math.umass.edu Mathematics & Statistics Dept. Lederle Graduate Research Tower phone 413 549-1020 (H) University of Massachusetts 413 545-2859 (W) 710 North Pleasant Street fax 413 545-1801 Amherst, MA 01003-9305
From: Laszlo Sturmann on 17 May 2010 07:11 S. B. Gray wrote: > Can anyone tell me why there is no WYSIWYG interface for Latex? > Any time I want to publish a paper I have to relearn it again, since I > publish rarely. > > I would gladly use MS Word if the math journals would accept it. > > And is there any movement to accepting Mathematica output, properly formatted? > > Steve Gray > > > I find WinEDT (www.winedt.com) extremely useful in writing papers. LS
From: gekko on 18 May 2010 02:00 On May 17, 9:11 pm, Laszlo Sturmann <lsch...(a)sonic.net> wrote: > S. B. Gray wrote: > > Can anyone tell me why there is no WYSIWYG interface for Latex? > > Any time I want to publish a paper I have to relearn it again, since I > > publish rarely. > > > I would gladly use MS Word if the math journals would accept it. > > > And is there any movement to accepting Mathematica output, properly for= matted? > > > Steve Gray > > I find WinEDT (www.winedt.com) extremely useful in writing papers. > > LS If you want to stay close to your Mathematica roots, you may want to check out Publicon. This is a WRI product designed specifically for producing high quality documents. It also offers pretty decent LaTeX output, and has stylesheets corresponding to the major journals (e.g. RevTeX for the Physical Review journals). It also "plays nice" with Mathematica, so cutting and pasting formulas and graphics is all straightforward. Personally, I don't really rate any of the WYSIWYG TeX editors -- and I find it wasteful having to grapple with all the idiosyncracies of yet another editor. My (current) solution is to use Mathematica to produce a high quality draft, which is batted around among co-authors. Finally, when we're ready to submit, I'll roll up my sleeves and transcribe to LaTeX. I find this actually takes less time overall (even if the transcription stage isn't much fun).
From: AES on 18 May 2010 02:01 In article <hsr890$bda$1(a)smc.vnet.net>, Murray Eisenberg <murray(a)math.umass.edu> wrote: > For Mac OS-X there's TeXShop (with the MacTeX > bundle built upon the TeX Live distribution). Viewing speeds after > typesetting varies with these front ends. All can do reverse-search. > > > On the Mac, for sheer speed of essentially simultaneous typesetting and > viewing, nothing [**could**] touch proprietary Blue Sky "Textures". > > [However}, there seems to have been no further > development of Textures in the last few years, ... Textures, sadly, appears to be dead. It may have been, while it was with us, not only an absolutely front-running implementation of TeX, but also one the greatest pieces of Mac software ever written. Join the TeX Users Group (<http://www.TUG.org>; $50) and you'll get each year a CD or DVD with TeX Live, TeXShop, and a ton of other TeX stuff. TeXShop is, as far as I know, the best currently available WYSIWYG (or anyway psuedo WYWIWYG) implementation of TeX for the Mac. I believe you can also download all the necessary stuff from their website, without joining. With TeXShop plus TeX LIve plus any of several inexpensive books or manuals on LaTeX, you should be able to handle any and all requirements of LaTeX for any journal or publisher. The point to LaTeX, in fact, is that you _only_ have to learn, once and for all, the basic LaTeX and TeX syntax, which is pretty simple, largely self-evident, and not that bad at all. Individual publishers can then distribute packages which you just dump into the LaTeX folder on your machine, and in many cases a marked up template file into which you just substitute your title, author name, abstract text, etc etc. By setting an initial option you can prepare a typeset ms in a simple report format for proofing, or a typeset ms in the exact format used and needed by that journal.
From: Andrzej Kozlowski on 18 May 2010 06:12
On 18 May 2010, at 15:01, AES wrote: >> >> [However}, there seems to have been no further >> development of Textures in the last few years, ... > > Textures, sadly, appears to be dead. Both of these assertions are not true (or at least not unquestionably so): http://www.bluesky.com/news/220b.html Andrzej Kozlowski |