[ESS] Care to critique some Emacs-ess slides?

Thompson,Paul Paul.Thompson at SanfordHealth.org
Sun Aug 26 16:25:58 CEST 2012


Here is a rule:

There is no such thing as LaTeX without \

Sorry, folks, but that whole idea is whack. Totally whack. It's like onions without tears. Onions have good qualities, but there is a cost. LaTeX has good qualities. The cost is \.

If you want formatting without \, use Word. You don't see a single \ but you don't see anything of any value.

The whole POINT of a markup language is to see the markup. If you don't want to see the markup, use a WYSIWYG editor like Word. 

Editors which do LaTeX hiding the markup are just another WYSIWYG 3rd order approximation. 

I have used LaTeX for a long time, have a cls file in the distribution, and am quite used to LaTeX. It's a matter of what you want to see. If you want glossy unusable stuff without \, you know where to go.
________________________________________
From: ess-help-bounces at r-project.org [ess-help-bounces at r-project.org] on behalf of Paul Johnson [pauljohn32 at gmail.com]
Sent: Sunday, August 26, 2012 1:57 AM
To: Norm Matloff
Cc: ess-help at stat.math.ethz.ch
Subject: Re: [ESS] Care to critique some Emacs-ess slides?

On Fri, Aug 24, 2012 at 10:45 AM, Vincent Goulet
<vincent.goulet at dgfc.ulaval.ca> wrote:
 à 11:09, Paul Johnson <pauljohn32 at gmail.com> a écrit :
>
>> In case you didn't notice, in the same folder I
>> leave the LyX file and graphics needed to reproduce this,
>
> ... you mean you don't use Emacs for LaTeX editing?! Man... ;-)
>
> v.

Oh, gosh.  Too True.   I will have to destroy the LyX evidence and
just use the tex file I exported from LyX from now on (see below).

I want an Emacs LaTeX major mode that hides all the markup, all this stuff:

\begin{itemize}
   \item
   \item
\end{item}

LyX  makes it easier to start and end a list, and it never forgets to
put \end for me.

If I used TeXMacs, you would frown too. But at least that's styled like Emacs.

I don't know that I agree with Norm's claim that the tex file produced
by LyX is unreadable. I'd say the major criticism of it for me is the
lack of indentation.  It is as readable as any LaTeX file I've whipped
up in Emacs.

But, if you open that tex file in Emacs, menu select all, and do M-x
indent-region (joking about my presentation there)... You get a tex
file that looks OK, at least to my eye:

http://pj.freefaculty.org/guides/Rcourse/emacs-ess/emacs-ess.tex

How can you hate on that?  Is the LaTeX you type up better looking? Really?

It does have some monkey business with \lyxframe, but that's not
entirely my fault.

So now my next mission is to write some Emacs macros to clean out the
lyx markup, and then destroy the LyX file entirely, so I become less
obviously ideologically compromised.

pj
--
Paul E. Johnson
Professor, Political Science    Assoc. Director
1541 Lilac Lane, Room 504     Center for Research Methods
University of Kansas               University of Kansas
http://pj.freefaculty.org            http://quant.ku.edu

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