From: Andrew Reilly on
On Wed, 31 Mar 2010 09:55:38 +0200, Nicolas Neuss wrote:

> I think this is the most important point. It would probably be very
> amusing to see a competition in math typing speed between someone
> proficient in TeX (who is additionally using a reasonable environment
> like Emacs/AucTeX) and someone proficient in typing math in Word or
> similar (are there such people at all?).

I was delighted, yesterday, to discover how far OpenOffice has come in
the math/equation entry sphere. Not only is it possible to enter
equations without pointing and clicking on menus, it's possible to do so
without even having to open up a different window/environment: just type
the equation using the TeX-like math language, then select it (mouse or
keyboard selection gestures) and then select Insert>Object>Formula. Yes,
I'd be much happier if that last step was a key sequence. Maybe it is: I
don't know. Very slick. Not as pretty as TeX, but good enough for my
current purposes. Much, much faster than I've seen in other WYSIWYG
editors.

Maybe the ODF (Open Document Format) might even come to have the same
sort of longevity as TeX. I really like that I can still recreate and
print the TeX documents that I wrote twenty years ago. Can't do that
with Word (although at least OpenOffice can open most of those old Word
documents that Word can't...)

Cheers,

--
Andrew
From: Tim Bradshaw on
On 2010-04-02 19:48:48 +0100, Andrew Reilly said:

> Maybe the ODF (Open Document Format) might even come to have the same
> sort of longevity as TeX. I really like that I can still recreate and
> print the TeX documents that I wrote twenty years ago. Can't do that
> with Word (although at least OpenOffice can open most of those old Word
> documents that Word can't...)

It seems to me that this is a case where there may be limited purpose
in re-fighting a battle which has been won (in this case, by TeX). If
I was designing a language for embedding maths, I think I would just
grit my teeth and nick great chunks of TeX. Interestingly, that's what
jsMath does, and it is really very effective indeed (when I type maths
now, I almost always do it using jsMath embedded in a TiddlyWiki,
rather than actually TeX).

From: Vassil Nikolov on

On Wed, 31 Mar 2010 10:53:09 +0100, Tim Bradshaw <tfb(a)tfeb.org> said:
> ...
> I would always prefer to write maths initially (I mean with a pen &
> paper), because it makes thinking easier somehow.

And because (traditional) mathematical notation is optimized
(rather, has evolved towards being optimized) for that, e.g. by
being more than one-dimensional.

I think it is a rather interesting question whether and how
mathematical notation will evolve in a different direction now
"under the pressure" of keyboard use.

> I would guess that the youth of today would just reject TeX out of
> hand because, you know, it's not pretty.

Not _all_ youth of today, though...

---Vassil.


--
"Be careful how you fix what you don't understand." (Brooks 2010, 185)
From: Tim Bradshaw on
On 2010-04-09 06:16:49 +0100, Vassil Nikolov said:

> I think it is a rather interesting question whether and how
> mathematical notation will evolve in a different direction now
> "under the pressure" of keyboard use.

So do I. I suspect it won't because there are other reasons why people
handwrite maths, but I may well be wrong.

From: Mario S. Mommer on

Tim Bradshaw <tfb(a)tfeb.org> writes:
> On 2010-04-09 06:16:49 +0100, Vassil Nikolov said:
>
>> I think it is a rather interesting question whether and how
>> mathematical notation will evolve in a different direction now
>> "under the pressure" of keyboard use.
>
> So do I. I suspect it won't because there are other reasons why
> people handwrite maths, but I may well be wrong.

In my experience, writing directly to TeX or anything similar is asking
for trouble unless you are doing simple things. The source is not all
that readable, and the hardcopy looks too good. The result is that you
do not see the mistakes and the holes in the arguments. Taking a draft
on paper and cleaning it up by copying the non-strike-out to new a paper
draft is the only really good way to make sure you are really really
really going over every detail again.

When I write maths, I do it on paper. When it is ready, I write it in
LaTeX, and that draft is already pretty close to the final product.

Restructuring a decently sized latex document through copy and paste is
problematic, because there is no compiler (nor will there ever be) to
tell you that the semantics do not fit any longer.