Hacker News: GiovanniP

New comment by GiovanniP in "Tectonic: A modernized, complete, self-contained TeX/LaTeX engine"

GiovanniP — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 19:20:19 +0000

I think it is fair to point at a paper where Van der Hoeven argues in detail in favor of the WYSIWYG paradigm:

J. van der Hoeven. GNU TeXmacs: a free, structured, wysiwyg and technical text editor. In Daniel Filipo, editor, Le document au XXI-ième siècle, volume 39–40, pages 39–50. Metz, 14–17 mai 2001. Actes du congrès GUTenberg.

Reproduced at https://www.texmacs.org/Data/TeXmacs.pdf

For why so few people use TeXmacs, it may be that it is because few people believe that it is worth trying, as one would not expect that it works so well :-)

New comment by GiovanniP in "Tectonic: A modernized, complete, self-contained TeX/LaTeX engine"

GiovanniP — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 10:41:07 +0000

I think it is so. As far as I know, there are no converters that can do that. A search with an LLM made me find https://arxiv.org/pdf/2605.16562, a paper describing the ArXiv conversion tool from LaTeX to HTML; here is a sentence from the abstract:

"corpus-scale conversion work aimed at 90% error-free HTML (currently 75%)"

although there may be issues that I do not understand or did not see (I looked at the paper very quickly) that make it more difficult for the authors than for the simplest possible translation.

New comment by GiovanniP in "Tectonic: A modernized, complete, self-contained TeX/LaTeX engine"

GiovanniP — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 09:26:53 +0000

While Typst appears to be popular, I think that TeXmacs, https://www.texmacs.org/, which is a program independent from both TeX and Emacs, is the kind of program that we need for writing: a fully WYSIWYG, fully structured document preparation system, in which you edit the structure of your document in a WYSIWYG way. When editing the structure on-screen, the user has no need to be aware that is doing so, as it looks like they are editing a text document; at the same time, the TeXmacs editor will guide the user to keeping a structured document.

New comment by GiovanniP in "GNU Texmacs"

GiovanniP — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 13:00:51 +0000

There is some support for the LaTeX ecosystem from within TeXmacs. If you want a TikZ drawing, you can insert it programmatically into a TeXmacs document in a seamless way---if you have the same font for your TeXmacs document and for LaTeX it will be nicely integrated as far as I know, You can see the blog post https://texmacs.github.io/notes/docs/embedding-tikz-figures-...

New comment by GiovanniP in "GNU Texmacs"

GiovanniP — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 20:49:23 +0000

It has to do with LaTeX and emacs in intent.

LaTeX: accomplished typography emacs: control of the interface

It delivers.

New comment by GiovanniP in "GNU Texmacs"

GiovanniP — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 20:42:30 +0000

The name is weird, the project is sound :-)

New comment by GiovanniP in "GNU Texmacs"

GiovanniP — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 20:41:25 +0000

Superior to LyX: fully WYSIWYG, no limitation on what it can do.

New comment by GiovanniP in "GNU Texmacs"

GiovanniP — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 20:39:52 +0000

I use it for all of the pedagogical material I distribute to my high school pupils. It allows me to type quickly and accurately math and explanation with exquisite typography. It allows me to edit freely and with total ease what I have already written: I don't have to look for the point where I have to edit because it is WYSIWYG.

I do not have to collaborate with anyone in writing so it does not matter that there are no users among my colleagues.

In my opinion it is superior to all other systems I tried (I tried many and a lot, and all of the main ones). And, importantly, it is equal or superior to the other systems in _all_ respects.

New comment by GiovanniP in "The code and open-source tools I used to produce a science fiction anthology"

GiovanniP — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 13:33:04 +0000

I would rather use TeXmacs, it frees you from the write-compile cycle while being equivalent (maybe in some ways better) from the point of view of the control you have on the document and the typographical quality.

There is also a wide choice of output formats.

New comment by GiovanniP in "I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst"

GiovanniP — Mon, 23 Jun 2025 11:16:35 +0000

In addition to making it possible to write easily, TeXmacs is also based on a markup language. It demonstrates that a markup language and WYSIWYG writing can coexist efficiently.

New comment by GiovanniP in "I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst"

GiovanniP — Mon, 23 Jun 2025 11:09:55 +0000

> Only Adobe InDesign provides a comparable implementation, tweaking all those details.

TeXmacs claims to have implemented microtypography as well (https://www.texmacs.org/tmweb/home/news.en.html, as I am reading it, in the opening paragraph on version 2.1)

New comment by GiovanniP in "Nikon reveals a lens that captures wide and telephoto images simultaneously"

GiovanniP — Mon, 30 Dec 2024 13:48:21 +0000

I agree that the images correspond to the same region in object space. Further assumptions on optical resolution don't work well, as the optical resolution depends on the f-number.

New comment by GiovanniP in "Nikon reveals a lens that captures wide and telephoto images simultaneously"

GiovanniP — Mon, 30 Dec 2024 09:57:36 +0000

> assuming infinite resolution

this is an assumption that goes against the concept of "f-number" so if one does it, they should not expect to get to anything sensible.

New comment by GiovanniP in "Nikon reveals a lens that captures wide and telephoto images simultaneously"

GiovanniP — Mon, 30 Dec 2024 09:53:43 +0000

I expect depth of focus to be different.

New comment by GiovanniP in "Typesetting Engines: A Programmer's Perspective"

GiovanniP — Mon, 11 Nov 2024 16:27:50 +0000

There is some support, but I do not know the details. You might try and ask in the TeXmacs forum, at http://forum.texmacs.cn/; a few of the developers read it and answer questions and they might have the information you are looking for.

New comment by GiovanniP in "Things I Won't Work With: Dimethylcadmium (2013)"

GiovanniP — Sun, 11 Aug 2024 08:47:50 +0000

"et alii" for people (masculine plural nominative)

"et alia" for things (neutrum plural nominative)

"et cetera" for things as well

New comment by GiovanniP in "There's more to mathematics than rigour and proofs (2007)"

GiovanniP — Wed, 19 Jun 2024 19:25:49 +0000

> 1. Write programs that you think are cool

> 2. Learn about data structures and algorithms and complexity and software organization.

> 3. Write programs that you think are cool. But since you know more, you can write more cool programs.

Hegel :-)

New comment by GiovanniP in "The Art of LaTeX: Common mistakes and advice for typesetting proofs"

GiovanniP — Mon, 09 Jan 2023 20:31:05 +0000

> visual output with suboptimal aesthetics (TeXmacs, and, to some extent, LyX)

Till now I took the developers word that the aesthetics of TeXmacs is better than the one of TeX and I would be curious to know where the opposite is true (and in case also why this cannot change)

New comment by GiovanniP in "Ask HN: Did TeXmacs' doubly misleading name hold it back for 20 years?"

GiovanniP — Fri, 30 Dec 2022 16:12:22 +0000

Packages for chemistry are useful, even if I don't use them myself. Also siunitx needs yet a TeXmacs equivalent (I think https://github.com/pireddag/SIunits/tree/simple is not yet good enough)

New comment by GiovanniP in "Ask HN: Did TeXmacs' doubly misleading name hold it back for 20 years?"

GiovanniP — Fri, 30 Dec 2022 15:18:57 +0000

On the other hand if something (in this case ease of installation) helps people to use the tool, then it helps TeXmacs too, which in turn helps users.