The biggest advantage of latex is that by (mostly) separating content from presentation, you can use revision control systems like git or svn to collaborate on papers. You can be in that final hour before the paper submission deadline, on a skype call with four authors scattered around the world, all simultaneously editing the paper (each using whatever tools they prefer), and be reasonably confident it won't all end in tears. That's when you really understand the advantage of this latex-style markup. Don't get me wrong - there are lots of things I hate about latex, but I'll almost certainly keep using it because of the workflow it enables.
I agree with this, my thesis committee wanted my thesis as a research paper (irrespective of whether my work was going to be published or not) but in the final stages the graduate college declined to approve it in spite of my committee's approval because they require a predefined format of the thesis. The change of format took me a few minutes, thanks to latex. I can't begin to imagine how much work and anxiety it would have taken to change the entire format at the last minute otherwise.
I always see this claim that latex separates content from presentation, but I don't see how it's true. As the article says, \emph{hello} is implemented in terms of font commands; it entangles the semantics (emphasis) and the presentation (italicisation), and there is no way to extract the semantics of a latex document and render it in a different format the way you can with e.g. Markdown.
There is a big difference between the web (HTML + CSS) and LaTeX (LaTex + styles) worlds in terms of culture, and that defeats the idea of "separating content from presentation".
On the web, that content and presentation are separate, that's a technically a possibility, and culturally an actuality. That is, while you have the technical tools to apply such a separation, the toolkit does not force it on you; you can choose to write html with in-place defined colors and font sizes and other style elements. That the standards are higher than that and one is expected to write clean structural HTML and specify style separately with CSS is just a cultural phenomenon.
In the LaTeX world (scientific community), separation of content and presentation is also technically feasible, but the culture that maintains it as standard is missing. Most LaTeX documents are written by scientists who just want the damn thing look as they prefer, and apply all nasty tricks that the system can offer to get at there. The more computer savvy ones engage macro writing to save them a few keystrokes, but that's far from a way of document authoring that keeps content and presentation separate.
There are a few nice things about Latex for scientific publications:
1. It's style driven. I'm not sure how well you can do this is Word now. But in Latex it's pretty easy to reformat your document to match a journal or thesis style.
2. It's scriptable. I don't mean that it's Turing complete. But you can drive it with a Makefile. This is great for scientific publications I've found. You can script it such that Make will re-build you tools, re-run analysis, generate new figures, and then regenerate the article. This save a lot of time when you're iterating over a publication.
3. Well integrated reference management. Bibtex itself is a mess, but if you don't need to alter the reference format, it works well.
4. Equations!
I think it's probably overkill for what he's doing. Sounds like Markdown + a reference manager would be fine for him. But for a lot of scientific publications it has handy features. I too would like to find something else, but I've not seen anything.
I guess you could write everything in HTML! But it's obviously not well suited to this application.
LaTeX is a good idea with a terrible implementation. The popularity of markdown (+variants) is a testament to the usefulness of plain text writing. However, LaTeX syntax is a clunky and the ecosystem is a scrapheap-challenge amalgamation of packages with assorted cross-incompatibilities.
Latex to PDF converters are also shockingly slow for this day and age, a simple document can take several seconds to compile compared to browsers which can re-flow complex HTML documents in milliseconds.
IMHO this is because of the ad-hoc nature of people using Latex, its been cobbled together by researchers based on their needs at the time while HTML+browsers have been carefully designed and optimized by people who know the intricacies of document rendering. Researchers just aren't very good software engineers as a rule so perhaps its not surprising that they produce something that more or less works but is not very well designed
I've said it before and I'll say it again: the single most effective use of ~$1 million for advancing math and physics research (two disciples for which no non-LaTeX solutions exist) would be to hire some developers for a couple of years and make an enterprise-quality successor to TeX. Keep the math syntax, make it handle infinite pages for the Web, and fix all the awful bits that waste hundreds of thousands of grad-student-man-hours each year.
This isn't fantasy. Zotero is evidence that custom built academic software funded by charitable foundations can be a tremendously positive service to the academic community.
To be fair, LaTeX has a more complicated method of processing text since it considers a lot of typographic issues that browsers do not, so it has to be slower than a browser when rendering text. That said, I don't know enough to say whether the amount it's slower is proportional or not.
There are a couple of issues here. First, Markdown and HTML simply punt on the vast majority of the issues that TeX solves. Just as the author rightly comments that TeX is not geared toward online publication, HTML is geared toward only that model. If you want to paginate HTML or Markdown, you do it yourself. Widows and orphans are (obviously) your problem to deal with. Compared to the work that TeX is doing, Markdown is, to a first order approximation, just catting the file. HTML can reflow a document in real-time because it's doing a really poor job of reflowing the document. Even when they work, they're just putting line breaks in whenever the width would otherwise be too wide. TeX is running a dynamic programming algorithm to minimize the "badness" of the line breaks across multiple lines and even paragraphs. And quite a lot of the time, the browser just throws its hands up and says, "fuck it, you can just scroll horizontally to read the rest of this line". You can't do that on paper. So of course it's faster. You might as well be complaining that Preview is faster than Photoshop.
HTML and Markdown don't do automatic hyphenation (across multiple languages). They don't do ligatures. They don't do proper text justification (neither does Microsoft Word or Libre Office for that matter). They don't do cross reference tracking (i.e., having automatically numbered sections, tables, figures, etc. with automatically updated references). They have no logic at all for automated float placement. Font handling is specified by a human instead of relying on algorithmic font selection and substitution when necessary. I could go on for pages of this.
I think the idea that web browser vendors are better at this sort of thing than TeX and LaTeX is so wrong I don't know where to start. The author complains that some of his 20 year old LaTeX articles rely on outdated files to render properly. While this is true, and very occasionally a problem, it's only very recently that you had even the vaguest hope that your HTML document would render the same way on two different computers owned by the same person today! Arguably, the biggest slice of the software industry is now devoted to making things render on browsers. And for Markdown, we quite recently saw that even the simplest text rendered in no fewer than 17 different ways depending on which software (and version) you processed it with. If my goal is to be able to reproduce the output of today 15 or 20 years from now, HTML would be the absolute worst choice I could think of, unless again, you stick with <b> tags and the like, and the subset of LaTeX you can reliably assume will always work gives you much broader coverage of the space of typesetting issues than the subset of HTML that doesn't change monthly does. Not to mention, I can still more easily go get an old LaTeX implementation to rebuild a document that doesn't compile anymore (but in 15 years, I've never had to). It's quite a lot harder to get Netscape Navigator 3 up and running to attempt to faithfully render a document I wrote in 1997.
Also, web browsers have historically been just about the buggiest, most insecure, and transient pieces of software we've ever written as a field, and TeX is famously maybe the highest quality piece of software ever written. It's more or less fine that the web changes every 18 months. It's a problem for archivists, but the web isn't really intended for that. Academic publications are though, and the impedance mismatch is, in my opinion, brutal.
The interface (by which I mean the programming language) of TeX and LaTeX is indeed pretty dreadful, but this is a really minor issue compared to the rest of it. There are a lot of things I dislike about LaTeX, but I don't see how HTML or Markdown is an improvement. You'd need a completely new thing that supported everything that LaTeX supports, and while you could certainly do so with a nicer language, you couldn't do it with something as clean and simple as Markdown -- there are just too many things you need to be able to tell it you want it to do.
> HTML+browsers have been carefully designed and optimized by people who know the intricacies of document rendering.
You're joking, right? HTML+CSS requires heaps of workarounds to achieve the most trivial layouts. The people behind these standards have no understanding of documents and no taste in software: they deem the absence of variables in CSS a feature, and the result is Less, scss, and similar preprocessors.
Had the CSS committee at least the sense to copy the boxes-and-glue model from TeX, things might not be so grim. As is, we seem to be stuck with their clumsiness for a long time.
The typesetting quality of web browsers doesn't even compare to that of TeX, which uses a dynamic programming algorithm to minimize the "badness" caused by line breaks in various places. This is aside from TeX's ability to typeset math.
> HTML+browsers have been carefully designed and optimized by people who know the intricacies of document rendering
I think HTML+browsers is something that has been cobbled together as well. Many times. With the added joy of useful features killed by political or profit driven reasons.
This is a really misleading statement, especially since it comes after him stating that "LaTeX is free in both senses".
LaTeX input files apparently lack a standard specification, which is admittedly bad, but then again, so do the input files of many programming languages that some people on HN are writing on a daily basis[0].
This is not the same thing as them being proprietary; anyone can write a new LaTeX parser and there is nothing stopping them legally or technically from doing so.
[0] I may be wrong, but I believe PHP and Ruby both fall under this category. Markdown is another example (everyone parses it in a slightly different way, and while it's generally consistent, there are definitely warts around the edge cases where it's clear that Markdown would benefit from having a standard).
By his definition, every document ever written in any DSL is in a propietary format.
Personally, I'm perfectly happy if I can open a document in a text editor and get the content that way. That obviously works perfectly fine with LaTeX, it doesn't work at all with doc.
I like Latex (Math/CS background), but I would definitely like to try some alternatives (like Asciidoc discussed in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8509062 ). The problem is I never can tell which Markdown/Docbook inspired systems actually have working implementations and which ones are hot air. I don't want to end up with a big SGML mess that I can't do anything with or have to edit CSS just to render a book in a standard format.
Any recommendations/tutorials?
My ideal system would allow something like literate-programming/sweave/knitr. The notation could be any of markdownish/xml/ascii. I would have to be able to do call-outs/annotations on listings with tags (not insane/fragile region specifications). I need figures and charts. And I would have to be able to produce at least HTML5, PDF, epub, mobi. And I need support for footnotes, endnotes, tables of contents, indexes, and bibliographies. Flexibility in back-ends (like being able to render to Latex) would also be good.
Edit: the sweave/knitr thing I can live without (could probably arranged a pre-process to do this).
asciidoc is quite nice. It can output DocBook which I think is pretty well supported.
I'm currently writing a book in asciidoc which produces output in all your mentioned formats and includes footnotes, endnotes, call-outs, code listings, index etc. However, whilst I write almost exclusively in asciidoc, a lot of the styling etc is done by the publisher's docbook workflow.
Sphinx has most of these, though not all (it doesn't have the literate programming part, it could probably be done though; and the standard builders are html4). And I'll acknowledge that ReST is hard to love.
I wish the meme about the supposed superiority of "declarative" languages would go away. They have tradeoffs, like everything else. "Make" is also declarative — and horrific.
TeX has plenty of warts by modern standards (and the LaTeX macro package even more so), but the suggestion that HTML+CSS work better for general layout use is ridiculous (the standards committee only heard that multi-column layouts are impossible without major hackery what, last year?). I tried docbook for a document a while ago, and it was horrible. SGML might be acceptable for machine generation, but not for human writing. The toolchain is even worse than TeX's, hard as that may be to believe.
A replacement for TeX would be fantastic, but its absence over the last 30 years suggests that it's difficult to get right and achieve critical mass.
His trouble seems to be not with LaTeX, but with materialism.
No matter what medium he put his texts down in, will he find that the text is somewhat bound to that medium now and it'll take work to modify and/or transfer it.
Pen and paper is "proprietary" in this line of thinking.
I don't think he understands what the word "proprietary" means. It means that the file format is secret or there are legal constraints on its use. Until recently Word documents clearly counted as prorietary, but now that microsoft has been forced to document its format to some degree .doc is listed as "controversially" proprietary on wikipedia.
Even today you will need to buy Microsoft Word to "properly" read .doc files. There are other readers (libreoffice) but they only do the basics, and in my experience they usually mangle the file.
LaTeX has never been proprietary because it has always been publicly documented.
FTA: > LaTeX input files are proprietary to LaTeX, just as .doc is Word.
I must be missing something --- LaTex .tex documents are written in plain ASCII text files with pseudo-English tags indicating generally how text is to be processed (italics, bold, etc.).
FTC: > Everybody is free to write a parser for .tex files and use it for whatever reason they want...
Exactly. Pandoc supposedly converts from LaTex into many other formats (although I haven't personally tried any of those particular conversions).
> I am sorry but I don't see this point... Everybody is free to write a parser for .tex files and use it for whatever reason they want...
It's great that you have the freedom to do that in theory. But it doesn't work in practice. The .tex format doesn't have a spec or independent implementations; it's complex and idiosyncratic, and there are no good general-purpose conversions from .tex to other formats (e.g. markdown, html). The only program you can really use .tex with is latex.
The multitude of third-party .doc readers would seem to disprove that assertion.
In any case, it's clear from the text that he uses "proprietary" to mean "specified only by the canonical implementation". In this respect, .tex qualifies but .doc no longer does, although .doc is so bizarre and complex that writing another parser from the spec is... challenging.
I use latex daily and tolerate it. If you can offer me a tool that does a similar job (conforms to ieee journal style specifications and deals with citations well) then I would love to hear about it.
The biggest reason I do like latex, is that it allows me to put 1 sentence per line and has a text based format that git handles well. This makes collaborative editing and writing much more manageable.
I understand some of the negative things about LaTeX but it generates outstanding documents that no other processing system can match so far. Specifically the typography:
>LaTeX will never be able to effectively render a LaTeX document to a web browser’s finite view of an infinitely tall document or read it aloud, because its output primitives are oriented around print media, and its apparently declarative constructs are defined in terms of them.
That is somewhat untrue. You can lay out content in a box of fixed width, and then set the page size to that plus margins. Now perhaps the performance isn't good enough for real time rendering, but setting up custom schemes is very possible and not as difficult as people might fear.
And LaTeX already supports PDF search, so I don't see why it could not support accessibility features like speaking the text.
Good news for the OP: The OP seems to
want more output options than just
paper or PDF. It appears that the OP
also wants HTML output. Okay.
TeX and LaTeX say next to
nothing about the final physical form of the document
and, instead, leave all that to an appropriate
device driver. Or, TeX (and likely LaTeX)
puts out a file called device independent
with three letter file name extension DVI.
Basically a DVI file says, put this character
here on the page, then put the next character
there on the page, etc. Then move to a new page.
Well, then, it would appear
that there could be a device driver that would
convert a DVI file to HTML. And there should be
a way to have the HTML file make use of suitable
fonts and the special math symbols. Besides,
now Unicode has a lot of characters and symbols.
It appears that the OP feels that typing a paper into
TeX or LaTeX somehow locks him into
TeX in a bad way. But, TeX is fully
open source with some of the best and
most beautiful software documentation
ever written.
There are latex to HTML converters and they only work for a subset of latex functionality. It is not as simple as defining a driver that outputs HTML.
Latex and HTML work in fundamentally different ways: latex typesets for a fixed paper size, and specifies its coordinates in physical dimensions. HTML is free flowing; if the user resizes the window the layout should adapt, they layout has to work on mobile devices, etc. The HTML way asks for a completely different way of designing layout, and Latex is simply not the right tool for that job.
Incidentally I believe that the Latex way of typesetting for a specific paper size is superior, because it allows the typesetter to manually arrange everything until it looks just right, whereas with HTML there are x number of browsers, with y number of screen sizes, and you have much less control over the final look.
Though he points out this mostly applies to philosophy papers. Many of the points do not really apply in some other scientific fields (I usually had no trouble submit LaTeX papers for CS journals/conferences).
The primary strength of using LaTeX is math typesetting. If you're not writing equations the argument gets to be very subjective. If you are writing equations there's nearly no alternative (at least one nearly as well proven).
> What is the alternative? The author does not propose any.
The author is an academic. He is concerned about writing papers. His solution is to write papers in Word, submit to journals, and let the publisher worry about the final layout.
The article mentions markdown, HTML. I think markdown is more practical for actually writing in, and combined with pandoc it can be very powerful. Both of these formats should work well with version control. Personally, I find that markdown's minimalism goes very nicely with git. As long as you use suitable line wrapping it generates very concise and helpful diffs.
Bonus: if you're using pandoc you get native use of LaTeX's math mode.
Wrote my thesis in IDML, worked surprisingly well, yet Adobe InDesign is a beast of its own. And once you run into more problems you're pretty much on your own.
Surely any modern complete (La)TeX replacement would be a good thing to have, but I haven't found out any yet, so LaTeX IMHO still remains one of the best choices when it comes to writing/publishing stuff.
I think that reStructuredText could be a nice foundation for some more generic writing/publishing solution, where TeX notation could be still uded for math environments (as I don't know any better one for that). Markdown is too vague, imprecise and inflexible, and CommonMark - a strongly specified, highly compatible implementation of Markdown - is not much better, mostly due to Markdown compatibility.
EDIT: AsciiDoc could be also used instead of reST.
I too agree with all of his points... but what's a realistic alternative stack that satisfies those points without drastically cutting down on the available rendering tools and packages for specialized tasks?
When I started grad school, I initially used LaTeX to prepare my articles. But then my advisor tried to open one of my documents on his machine (Windows, I'm using a Mac) and some kind of weird error came up. So we spent one whole advising session with him searching for MiKTeX and installing it, whereupon my document still wouldn't load for whatever reason.
Then once BibTeX got in the mix, it became even messier. Well, I finally finished the article and submitted it to a journal, but they had so many requirements for LaTeX submissions that it took a while to change everything for it. Once I finally submitted it -- surprise! -- their online LaTeX compiler came back with another weird error. It took me about 8 more submission attempts to isolate the "bug" (which was some kind of issue due to differences in versions and default packages installed on their machine vs mine), and I finally got a PDF generated. Except it still didn't look the same as mine for whatever reason.
Well, the article got rejected from that journal, and so as I'm applying for another journal, I read "Word documents only".
So I gave up on LaTeX. Too much of a hassle for me. Maybe it's a smooth process for everyone else, but I don't have any problems just typing a Word document and sending it off. (Although I do miss LaTeX's equation typesetting system.)
TeX sources are only for co-authors. Everybody else gets the generated pdf. Advisors et al can annotate the pdf or print-and-scribble. All my publishing venues only gave templates and required a pdf.
I think LaTeX has one disadvantage and it is not mentioned in the linked article. It has nothing to do with this "Cargo cult" thing, which I'm not sure it used correctly in this text but nevermind that.
The disadvantage is, that while LaTeX has an excellent support for PDF or PS its support for e.g. EPUB is awful.
Otherwise there is nothing better to write longer text than LaTeX.
It's funny to hear this compared to Markdown. The reference implementation of Markdown uses regexes applied in order---an operationally defined language. Only niche implementations like the beautiful Pandoc---also by a philosopher---use a real parser to provide a less leaky declarative semantics.
[+] [-] mhandley|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pavanred|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pinko|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lmm|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dzsekijo|11 years ago|reply
On the web, that content and presentation are separate, that's a technically a possibility, and culturally an actuality. That is, while you have the technical tools to apply such a separation, the toolkit does not force it on you; you can choose to write html with in-place defined colors and font sizes and other style elements. That the standards are higher than that and one is expected to write clean structural HTML and specify style separately with CSS is just a cultural phenomenon.
In the LaTeX world (scientific community), separation of content and presentation is also technically feasible, but the culture that maintains it as standard is missing. Most LaTeX documents are written by scientists who just want the damn thing look as they prefer, and apply all nasty tricks that the system can offer to get at there. The more computer savvy ones engage macro writing to save them a few keystrokes, but that's far from a way of document authoring that keeps content and presentation separate.
[+] [-] JulianMorrison|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] new299|11 years ago|reply
1. It's style driven. I'm not sure how well you can do this is Word now. But in Latex it's pretty easy to reformat your document to match a journal or thesis style.
2. It's scriptable. I don't mean that it's Turing complete. But you can drive it with a Makefile. This is great for scientific publications I've found. You can script it such that Make will re-build you tools, re-run analysis, generate new figures, and then regenerate the article. This save a lot of time when you're iterating over a publication.
3. Well integrated reference management. Bibtex itself is a mess, but if you don't need to alter the reference format, it works well.
4. Equations!
I think it's probably overkill for what he's doing. Sounds like Markdown + a reference manager would be fine for him. But for a lot of scientific publications it has handy features. I too would like to find something else, but I've not seen anything.
I guess you could write everything in HTML! But it's obviously not well suited to this application.
[+] [-] mangecoeur|11 years ago|reply
IMHO this is because of the ad-hoc nature of people using Latex, its been cobbled together by researchers based on their needs at the time while HTML+browsers have been carefully designed and optimized by people who know the intricacies of document rendering. Researchers just aren't very good software engineers as a rule so perhaps its not surprising that they produce something that more or less works but is not very well designed
[+] [-] jessriedel|11 years ago|reply
This isn't fantasy. Zotero is evidence that custom built academic software funded by charitable foundations can be a tremendously positive service to the academic community.
https://www.zotero.org/about/
Also, everyone should read deong's comment.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8511509
[+] [-] joemi|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] deong|11 years ago|reply
HTML and Markdown don't do automatic hyphenation (across multiple languages). They don't do ligatures. They don't do proper text justification (neither does Microsoft Word or Libre Office for that matter). They don't do cross reference tracking (i.e., having automatically numbered sections, tables, figures, etc. with automatically updated references). They have no logic at all for automated float placement. Font handling is specified by a human instead of relying on algorithmic font selection and substitution when necessary. I could go on for pages of this.
I think the idea that web browser vendors are better at this sort of thing than TeX and LaTeX is so wrong I don't know where to start. The author complains that some of his 20 year old LaTeX articles rely on outdated files to render properly. While this is true, and very occasionally a problem, it's only very recently that you had even the vaguest hope that your HTML document would render the same way on two different computers owned by the same person today! Arguably, the biggest slice of the software industry is now devoted to making things render on browsers. And for Markdown, we quite recently saw that even the simplest text rendered in no fewer than 17 different ways depending on which software (and version) you processed it with. If my goal is to be able to reproduce the output of today 15 or 20 years from now, HTML would be the absolute worst choice I could think of, unless again, you stick with <b> tags and the like, and the subset of LaTeX you can reliably assume will always work gives you much broader coverage of the space of typesetting issues than the subset of HTML that doesn't change monthly does. Not to mention, I can still more easily go get an old LaTeX implementation to rebuild a document that doesn't compile anymore (but in 15 years, I've never had to). It's quite a lot harder to get Netscape Navigator 3 up and running to attempt to faithfully render a document I wrote in 1997.
Also, web browsers have historically been just about the buggiest, most insecure, and transient pieces of software we've ever written as a field, and TeX is famously maybe the highest quality piece of software ever written. It's more or less fine that the web changes every 18 months. It's a problem for archivists, but the web isn't really intended for that. Academic publications are though, and the impedance mismatch is, in my opinion, brutal.
The interface (by which I mean the programming language) of TeX and LaTeX is indeed pretty dreadful, but this is a really minor issue compared to the rest of it. There are a lot of things I dislike about LaTeX, but I don't see how HTML or Markdown is an improvement. You'd need a completely new thing that supported everything that LaTeX supports, and while you could certainly do so with a nicer language, you couldn't do it with something as clean and simple as Markdown -- there are just too many things you need to be able to tell it you want it to do.
[+] [-] gcv|11 years ago|reply
You're joking, right? HTML+CSS requires heaps of workarounds to achieve the most trivial layouts. The people behind these standards have no understanding of documents and no taste in software: they deem the absence of variables in CSS a feature, and the result is Less, scss, and similar preprocessors.
Had the CSS committee at least the sense to copy the boxes-and-glue model from TeX, things might not be so grim. As is, we seem to be stuck with their clumsiness for a long time.
[+] [-] WallWextra|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Shorel|11 years ago|reply
I think HTML+browsers is something that has been cobbled together as well. Many times. With the added joy of useful features killed by political or profit driven reasons.
[+] [-] chimeracoder|11 years ago|reply
This is a really misleading statement, especially since it comes after him stating that "LaTeX is free in both senses".
LaTeX input files apparently lack a standard specification, which is admittedly bad, but then again, so do the input files of many programming languages that some people on HN are writing on a daily basis[0].
This is not the same thing as them being proprietary; anyone can write a new LaTeX parser and there is nothing stopping them legally or technically from doing so.
[0] I may be wrong, but I believe PHP and Ruby both fall under this category. Markdown is another example (everyone parses it in a slightly different way, and while it's generally consistent, there are definitely warts around the edge cases where it's clear that Markdown would benefit from having a standard).
[+] [-] revelation|11 years ago|reply
Personally, I'm perfectly happy if I can open a document in a text editor and get the content that way. That obviously works perfectly fine with LaTeX, it doesn't work at all with doc.
[+] [-] jmount|11 years ago|reply
Any recommendations/tutorials?
My ideal system would allow something like literate-programming/sweave/knitr. The notation could be any of markdownish/xml/ascii. I would have to be able to do call-outs/annotations on listings with tags (not insane/fragile region specifications). I need figures and charts. And I would have to be able to produce at least HTML5, PDF, epub, mobi. And I need support for footnotes, endnotes, tables of contents, indexes, and bibliographies. Flexibility in back-ends (like being able to render to Latex) would also be good.
Edit: the sweave/knitr thing I can live without (could probably arranged a pre-process to do this).
[+] [-] amouat|11 years ago|reply
I'm currently writing a book in asciidoc which produces output in all your mentioned formats and includes footnotes, endnotes, call-outs, code listings, index etc. However, whilst I write almost exclusively in asciidoc, a lot of the styling etc is done by the publisher's docbook workflow.
[+] [-] masklinn|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ultimape|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gcv|11 years ago|reply
TeX has plenty of warts by modern standards (and the LaTeX macro package even more so), but the suggestion that HTML+CSS work better for general layout use is ridiculous (the standards committee only heard that multi-column layouts are impossible without major hackery what, last year?). I tried docbook for a document a while ago, and it was horrible. SGML might be acceptable for machine generation, but not for human writing. The toolchain is even worse than TeX's, hard as that may be to believe.
A replacement for TeX would be fantastic, but its absence over the last 30 years suggests that it's difficult to get right and achieve critical mass.
[+] [-] siscia|11 years ago|reply
I am sorry but I don't see this point... Everybody is free to write a parser for .tex files and use it for whatever reason they want...
You are not free to do so with .doc or other proprietary format...
[+] [-] tokai|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ealloc|11 years ago|reply
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proprietary_format
Even today you will need to buy Microsoft Word to "properly" read .doc files. There are other readers (libreoffice) but they only do the basics, and in my experience they usually mangle the file.
LaTeX has never been proprietary because it has always been publicly documented.
[+] [-] dctoedt|11 years ago|reply
I must be missing something --- LaTex .tex documents are written in plain ASCII text files with pseudo-English tags indicating generally how text is to be processed (italics, bold, etc.).
FTC: > Everybody is free to write a parser for .tex files and use it for whatever reason they want...
Exactly. Pandoc supposedly converts from LaTex into many other formats (although I haven't personally tried any of those particular conversions).
[+] [-] lmm|11 years ago|reply
It's great that you have the freedom to do that in theory. But it doesn't work in practice. The .tex format doesn't have a spec or independent implementations; it's complex and idiosyncratic, and there are no good general-purpose conversions from .tex to other formats (e.g. markdown, html). The only program you can really use .tex with is latex.
[+] [-] lamby|11 years ago|reply
Eh?
[+] [-] mikeash|11 years ago|reply
In any case, it's clear from the text that he uses "proprietary" to mean "specified only by the canonical implementation". In this respect, .tex qualifies but .doc no longer does, although .doc is so bizarre and complex that writing another parser from the spec is... challenging.
[+] [-] Rhapso|11 years ago|reply
The biggest reason I do like latex, is that it allows me to put 1 sentence per line and has a text based format that git handles well. This makes collaborative editing and writing much more manageable.
[+] [-] sktrdie|11 years ago|reply
http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/1319/showcase-of-beau...
http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/85904/showcase-of-bea...
Also the graphs are outstanding:
http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/158668/nice-scientifi...
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] hdevalence|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] htns|11 years ago|reply
That is somewhat untrue. You can lay out content in a box of fixed width, and then set the page size to that plus margins. Now perhaps the performance isn't good enough for real time rendering, but setting up custom schemes is very possible and not as difficult as people might fear.
And LaTeX already supports PDF search, so I don't see why it could not support accessibility features like speaking the text.
[+] [-] graycat|11 years ago|reply
TeX and LaTeX say next to nothing about the final physical form of the document and, instead, leave all that to an appropriate device driver. Or, TeX (and likely LaTeX) puts out a file called device independent with three letter file name extension DVI.
Basically a DVI file says, put this character here on the page, then put the next character there on the page, etc. Then move to a new page.
Well, then, it would appear that there could be a device driver that would convert a DVI file to HTML. And there should be a way to have the HTML file make use of suitable fonts and the special math symbols. Besides, now Unicode has a lot of characters and symbols.
It appears that the OP feels that typing a paper into TeX or LaTeX somehow locks him into TeX in a bad way. But, TeX is fully open source with some of the best and most beautiful software documentation ever written.
[+] [-] andreasvc|11 years ago|reply
Latex and HTML work in fundamentally different ways: latex typesets for a fixed paper size, and specifies its coordinates in physical dimensions. HTML is free flowing; if the user resizes the window the layout should adapt, they layout has to work on mobile devices, etc. The HTML way asks for a completely different way of designing layout, and Latex is simply not the right tool for that job.
Incidentally I believe that the Latex way of typesetting for a specific paper size is superior, because it allows the typesetter to manually arrange everything until it looks just right, whereas with HTML there are x number of browsers, with y number of screen sizes, and you have much less control over the final look.
[+] [-] tonfa|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TTPrograms|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] qznc|11 years ago|reply
Office documents do not play well with version control systems.
HTML for printing is quite poor and buggy on features (e.g. column layout, page-relative positioning).
[+] [-] sampo|11 years ago|reply
The author is an academic. He is concerned about writing papers. His solution is to write papers in Word, submit to journals, and let the publisher worry about the final layout.
[+] [-] titanomachy|11 years ago|reply
Bonus: if you're using pandoc you get native use of LaTeX's math mode.
[+] [-] mxfh|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] przemoc|11 years ago|reply
Getting things done in LaTeX (or not)
http://abyss.przemoc.net/post/28208254393/getting-things-don...
Surely any modern complete (La)TeX replacement would be a good thing to have, but I haven't found out any yet, so LaTeX IMHO still remains one of the best choices when it comes to writing/publishing stuff.
I think that reStructuredText could be a nice foundation for some more generic writing/publishing solution, where TeX notation could be still uded for math environments (as I don't know any better one for that). Markdown is too vague, imprecise and inflexible, and CommonMark - a strongly specified, highly compatible implementation of Markdown - is not much better, mostly due to Markdown compatibility.
EDIT: AsciiDoc could be also used instead of reST.
[+] [-] andridk|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ObviousScience|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Xcelerate|11 years ago|reply
Then once BibTeX got in the mix, it became even messier. Well, I finally finished the article and submitted it to a journal, but they had so many requirements for LaTeX submissions that it took a while to change everything for it. Once I finally submitted it -- surprise! -- their online LaTeX compiler came back with another weird error. It took me about 8 more submission attempts to isolate the "bug" (which was some kind of issue due to differences in versions and default packages installed on their machine vs mine), and I finally got a PDF generated. Except it still didn't look the same as mine for whatever reason.
Well, the article got rejected from that journal, and so as I'm applying for another journal, I read "Word documents only".
So I gave up on LaTeX. Too much of a hassle for me. Maybe it's a smooth process for everyone else, but I don't have any problems just typing a Word document and sending it off. (Although I do miss LaTeX's equation typesetting system.)
[+] [-] qznc|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joosters|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tehabe|11 years ago|reply
The disadvantage is, that while LaTeX has an excellent support for PDF or PS its support for e.g. EPUB is awful.
Otherwise there is nothing better to write longer text than LaTeX.
[+] [-] robinhoodexe|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brians|11 years ago|reply