[Tuglist] front-end to latex

[David Kastrup]

"Sridhar M.A." <mas@uomphysics.net> writes:

> Have seen my colleagues use its previous avatar, KTeXmaker2. Kile is for
> KDE3 (correct me if I am wrong). It is a good ide like thing for LaTeX.
> But, if one is accustomed to vim/emacs style of editors (lots of
> customisations, user defined macros, etc), then these things do not help
> there. But for a beginner it helps a lot. 
> 
> Reg. comparision with LyX, there should be none :-) LyX is supposed
> to be a WYSIWYG frontend for LaTeX.

Uh, no.  LyX is supposed to be a word processor that uses LaTeX as
its main backend.  It cannot natively deal with LaTeX files, it has
to import them first.  This loses any formatting of the LaTeX source,
and more often than not, some further information.  LyX cannot even
reliably reimport its own exported files.  It also is not supposed to
be WYSIWYG, but what LyX developers call "What you see is what you
mean", WYSIWYM.  That is, the source code is marked up in a way as to
make the underlying document structure more visible than "real"
WYSIWYG could, since it can generously apply colours and buttons and
stuff that does not make it to the output.

IIRC, KTeXmaker2 is basically a so-called TeX-shell and an editor,
but does not meddle with your source text itself: you can easily take
LaTeX code from other people, edit it, and send them the edited
version, something that is not possible with LyX (LyX has its own
file format, and importing and reexporting LaTeX changes a lot).

In that respect, LyX is similar to TeXmacs.  TeXmacs, however, is
true WYSIWYG in that the antialiased screen/editor display using TeX
fonts is exactly what will get printed (apart from different
resolutions).

I'll be holding a talk about various attempts of WYSIWYG tools at
TUG2002, hope to be seeing you there.  The paper for the talk will be
in the proceedings, and I suppose I won't have problems putting it on
the Web separately.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum
Email: David.Kastrup@t-online.de