
Texture – As open as LaTeX and as simple as a classic word processor - _mql
http://substance.io/texture/
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hprotagonist
For all the scientific writing I do (ie, 99% of my output that isn't blather
on the internet), i use LaTeX or markdown. LaTeX primarily for peer-reviewed
work, markdown for notes, informal documentation, and whitepapers. In both
cases, i can use a powerful text editor (sublime or atom or emacs) with very
rich and highly developed cross-platform support.

What are some compelling reasons to use this tool instead?

~~~
capnrefsmmat
The scientific publishing workflow is insane, and this tool seems like it
could help.

In the biomedical sciences (or any field that ends up on PubMed), articles
have to be converted to JATS XML
([http://jats.nlm.nih.gov/](http://jats.nlm.nih.gov/)), a standard XML dialect
for journal articles. It builds in citation metadata, cross-referencing,
figure references, etc., and is supposed to be a stable archival format for
long-term storage of articles. Individual publishers (PLOS, BMC, etc.) build
their entire publication workflows around JATS, so articles can be typeset
into PDF or rendered to HTML, or delivered to e-reader apps or whatever. Since
it's semantic XML, you can do bibliography mining, automatic reference
following, extraction of figures, or whatever you might want to make reading
or text-mining easier.

But articles are often written in Word, so there's a tremendous amount of work
going into manually or semi-manually converting every manuscript to semantic
XML from the Word soup it arrives as. Same goes for LaTeX: a few journals just
publish LaTeXed PDFs directly, but big publishers like Elsevier and Springer
have semi-automated processes for converting LaTeX to in-house formats so they
can provide HTML versions of pages.

So, short version: an editor supporting JATS XML can support all the features
you need in a scientific document, and can dramatically simplify the
publication workflow and hopefully save a bunch of money. And hopefully open-
access journals pass that savings on to users.

For users, it could mean better e-reading apps (so you don't have to zoom in
on tiny fonts in a PDF on your iPad), better support for cross-referencing and
figures than Word has, automated formatting (journals style the XML, so you
don't have to do margin and layout crap), and a simpler submission process.

~~~
dmd
And yet if you try and submit to publishers in JATS, editors tell you they
have no idea what it is, and can you please send a Word document like everyone
else...

~~~
hprotagonist
Yeah, that's kind of my point.

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dtparr
Interesting phrasing under the license section:

>Texture is open source, and you are legally free to use it commercially. If
you are using Texture to make profit, we expect that you help fund its
development and maintenance.

My first read through, I thought it was making a free as in beer/speech
distinction for commercial use, but looking at the actual license on github,
that doesn't appear to be the case. I think the second sentence is perhaps
more often worded as 'ask' or 'hope' vs. 'expect' which I initially took as
more of a contractual expectation (i.e. a requirement).

~~~
frik
[https://github.com/substance/texture/blob/develop/LICENSE.md](https://github.com/substance/texture/blob/develop/LICENSE.md)

I wonder why they don't use a variant of the BSD/MIT or GPL?

~~~
rwmj
This is the MIT license (compare:
[https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT](https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT))

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_mql
Thank you very much for your comments! A few notes from the authors:

Texture's first goal is its use at publishers, during their review and QC
processes. Word or InDesign submissions are converted to JATS using the
converter from Open Journal Systems (OJS) and from then on are treated with
Texture until publication.

Once journals have adopted JATS in their editing workflow, I'm sure they are
willing to switch allowing submissions in JATS. Then authors have an incentive
to write their papers in Texture from the beginning.

Texture is hackable and can be extended via packages implemented in JS (think
Github Atom editor). Each JATS node type is implemented as a package already,
with still many of them missing (math, figgroups, ...). A package
implementation looks like this:

[https://github.com/substance/texture/tree/develop/lib/taggin...](https://github.com/substance/texture/tree/develop/lib/tagging)

We understand that publishers have different needs and allow them to configure
and customize the editor to any degree. We also want to open up the editor to
community contributions, e.g. one could implement an R-backed visualization
content type (see [https://stenci.la/](https://stenci.la/)), that could live
right in the editor. This would require introducing custom tags in the JATS
serialization format, which we think is valid, if you are aware of the
implications.

Texture is at an Alpha state, but a number of organisations committed to
funding it's development, so we should see stable versions in the coming
months. You are invited to join the Substance Consortium, which drives the
development of Texture.

[http://substance.io/consortium/](http://substance.io/consortium/)

See the current product brief, until we have published a public roadmap.

[https://docs.google.com/document/d/1v01mfeJw0IHgN7EIKE6JtEkE...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1v01mfeJw0IHgN7EIKE6JtEkECxXkRWi6eq3cesoRzY4/edit?usp=sharing)

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suxen9
Sure...got it working but how do enter math? You know, $x^2$ or integrals or
fractions?

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lobster_johnson
This is apparently powered by Substance, a JS library that implements a
WYSIWYG editor, and which looks interesting.

I wonder how it stacks up against the other leading JS-based editors such as
ProseMirror, Quill and Draft, which are all quite solid at this point.

(Unfortunately, some rudimentary testing shows that Texture is buggy to the
point of being unusable — a lot buggier than I expect for a beta. For example,
ctrl-Z to undo doesn't work in Safari and works awkwardly in Chrome; pasting
doesn't preserve any formatting or semantic attributes; I can't seem to be
able to modify (or even insert) any images; and it's pretty much completely
non-functional on iOS.)

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ams6110
Might want to do somthing about that 1MB screenshot rendered as a 770x570
image.

~~~
speps
Also, the name, I would have taken this tool as related to textures... not
text.

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robochat
Latex itself is still progressing, they've incorporated lua into Tex so that
they can add new features. There are also alternatives to Latex such as
ConText although I've never heard of anyone actually using it. But in general
it's hard to know what's really going on without doing a lot of research.

I also once read about another alternative to Latex called Lout but it never
seemed to go anywhere.

I just use Lyx now to write my articles. I've actually pretty much forgotten
the Latex that I used to know.

~~~
johntaitorg
Yeah, LyX is excellent if you understand LaTeX but don't use it often enough
to memorize it.

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matt4077
Not sure if I'm expecting too much, but the html in the editor is quite
terrible – <span>s used for everything, including headlines, <br> to separate
paragraphs etc. HTML5 has dramatically increased the potential for semantic
html and I wish more people would make use of it.

~~~
int_19h
If I understand correctly, the HTML is not actually published. So there are no
benefits to having a better semantic structure to it - think of it as a
rendering target for the sole purpose of making it look nice on the screen.

