[Texmacs-dev] StXlus, proposed new name for TeXmacs

[david]

TeXmacs advocates know that this name sucks. Really, everyone who
knows TeX thinks that TeXmacs is TeX-based and one must lengthily
explain it is not! And people who do not know TeX just find the name
complicated and hard to pronounce and remember.

So, the name is misleading, complicated and hard to remember. That is
really *poor* marketing!

I have been thinking for quite some time over a new name which would
not have this defiencies. That is hard to find a descriptive name for
something like TeXmacs, so I had no good idea... until now!


I propose: StXlus [stI-l&s]

The X of StXlus is actually a lowercase chi (greek letter), the
braketed text is the english phonetic representation of the work
"stylus" (from Merriam-Webster Online).


    Why Stylus?

Because what is the most important feature of TeXmacs? Writing with
styles. Writing was done in the ancient times by using a stylus on a
clay table. And the word 'style' is clearly in the name. Also the 'us'
suffix makes it look scientific (or ancient) which will appeal
mathemathical user and people interested in typography.


    Why a chi?

The initial reason was to keep a discrete reference to TeX, where the
X was well known for not being prononced the obvious way. Also, the
use of a greek letter is also a reference to mathematical and
multilingual editing. Another nice thing is that it looks very much
like and X, so it can mean 'eXtendable' (that we could spell with a
chi too) which is one of the main characteristics of TeXmacs. Finally,
that makes the name really distinctive and a chi looks quite like a y.

It is important to use a distinctive representation because business
are such pains-in-the-ass when it come to protecting their trademarks,
and you can be sure that a name like 'stylus' has already been
trademarked in any imaginable field!

Also, the overall shape of StXlus is similar to TeXmacs, making the
transition easier.


    But it is not spelled as it is written!

Right, but unlike TeXmacs, it is really unpalatable to most speakers
to pronounce the X in Stylus as a x. So I think we can expect people
to naturally switch to the closest natural word, which happens to be
right pronounciation. That is made even more probably because 'stylus'
is such a common word in computing (epson stylus, graphic table
stylus...).

In addition, to make it clear what is the right pronounciation, we can
choose to put the phonetic spelling just after the ascii name in
titles.

But I am not sure that people will not spell it 'styxlus'... which is
not really easy to pronounce and is reminiscent to the river of the
deads in ancient greek mythology.


    Well, and how can it be used for slogans?

A few examples:

  -- StXlus, the X without the LaTe. (more efficient than LaTeX)

  -- StXlus, XML without the MeaningLess. (WYSIWYG!)

  -- StXlus, get the Y out of Style. (Y is pronounced 'why',
     structured and easy to use)

  -- StXlus, writing with more style.

  -- StXlus, extensible and styled.

  -- StXlus, emacs busted by Y key! (for geeks...)


    Then what is the hidden flaw?

Someon. have already register stylus.org... But that is not a big
problem because we actually want stxlus.org.


How do you like it?


-- 
David Allouche         | GNU TeXmacs -- Writing is a pleasure
Free software engineer |    http://www.texmacs.org
   http://ddaa.net     |    http://alqua.com/tmresources
   address@hidden  |    address@hidden
TeXmacs is NOT a LaTeX front-end and is unrelated to emacs.