GNU TeXmacs

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GNU T_EX_MACS (alternatively, TeXmacs) is a free scientific word processor component of the GNU project, which was inspired by both TeX and GNU Emacs. It is written and maintained by Joris van der Hoeven. The program allows you to write structured documents via a user-friendly WYSIWYG interface. New styles may be created by the user. The program implements high-quality typesetting algorithms and TeX fonts, which help the user to produce professional looking documents.

The high typesetting quality still goes through for automatically generated formulas, which makes TeXmacs suitable as an interface for a number of computer algebra systems including Maxima. TeXmacs also supports the Guile/Scheme extension language, so that the user may customize the interface and write his own extensions to the program.

TeXmacs currently runs on most Unix-based architectures, including GNU/Linux, Cygwin for Microsoft Windows and Fink for Mac OS X. Moreover, a native port exists for Microsoft Windows. Converters exist for TeX/LaTeX, and they are under development for HTML/MathML/XML. TeXmacs also features a presentation mode and it is planned to evolve towards a complete scientific office suite, with spreadsheet capacities and a technical drawing editor.

[edit] Philosophy

In a similar way as documents with a high typesetting quality should allow readers to focus on content rather than typesetting details, the philosophy behind TeXmacs is that a good editor should allow authors to focus on what they write rather than syntactic details. However, the drawback of classical WYSIWYG editors like Microsoft Word is that they encourage authors to format their documents in a visual rather than a logical way. The goal of the TeXmacs project is to provide a WYSIWYG editor that makes it possible and natural to write structured texts. Moreover, the typesetting quality is not sacrificed and is similar to what you would obtain with TeX. In order to obtain a reasonably interactive typesetting speed, this last point required the implementation of a new typesetting engine. Therefore, TeXmacs is not a front-end to LaTeX.