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Latex is a very bad format and dead end for interchanging to other formats. Also like Pandoc and Markdown... if somebody is interested for a workflow to write

Latex is a very bad format and dead end for interchanging to other formats. Also like Pandoc and Markdown... if somebody is interested for a workflow to write a scientific paper with it check this project out: https://github.com/tompollard/phd_thesis_markdown https://github.com/tompollard/phd_thesis_markdown

krapht 11y ago
Latex has too much inertia for users to switch anytime soon. The only competition is from commercial tools like Adobe Framemaker. I hope the future will turn out to be Lyx + Asciidoctor export. If Microsoft Word ever improves their math input interface, I think it would just kill off LaTex completely. It's already almost mandatory to use for document interchange. Markdown is too limited. It has no standard for extensions - Asciidoc does. Markdown IMO is strictly for writing blog posts that are mostly text.
- sebastianavina 11y ago
  also, once you get used to latex (and emacs in my case), you can't find any editor or format that makes exactly what you want as latex.
j2kun 11y ago
Strictly speaking, isn't this false by virtue of latex compiling to pdf? And I have been looking hard for years and haven't found anything to replace TeX that fulfills even half my needs (as a person who does math typesetting in large documents almost daily). LaTeX has its issues, but it's the best we've got.
- peatmoss 11y ago
  Compiling to PDF as a display format, and being amenable to translation to another markup format that retains the structure of the original markup, are slightly different tasks. In general, I'd agree with the parent that LaTeX is something of a dead end in terms of translation. LaTeX will happily compile to PS/PDF/DVI, but translation to something like HTML is pretty reliant on using a subset of LaTeX. You can, after all, write LaTeX code to do computation. In my experience with Pandoc, there are a good number of packages that simply don't work when translating from LaTeX. The more specialized or formatting specific the package--the further you deviate from the standard Article class and simple section headers--the less likely that you'll have a good result.
  - j2kun 11y ago
    A format is a format, but point taken. I've found that pandoc (and every other conversion utility) doesn't even produce useful results for LaTeX even if the LaTeX source doesn't use any complex macros or fringe packages. The problem seems not to be that LaTeX is too powerful, but rather that the point of HTML and Markdown is to be as lightweight as possible. LaTeX, on the other hand, is meant to be a useful tool for humans to use to minimize the amount of boilerplate needed to write a large technical document (in print or on the web!).
peatmoss 11y ago
This is actually kind of true. LaTeX is a Turing-complete language, which makes converting it to other things somewhat unreliable. But, there's kind of an informal subset of LaTeX that you can use and not be too bad off with Pandoc. In general, I'd like to do academic and report writing in Markdown (or Org!), but limitations of Markdown usually make it easier for me to do my writing directly in LaTeX, portability be damned. The biggest impediment for Markdown in academic / report writing I'm my opinion is the lack of internal references (things like "see figure X"). Org-mode can be converted via Pandoc much the same as markdown, but doesn't have the issue with cross-references.
- semi-extrinsic 11y ago
  Seconded the cross-reference gripe with Markdown. Somebody clever has to be working on that already, it's such an obvious gap. I think it would enable things like RMarkdown to reach "critical mass"

krapht 11y ago

Latex has too much inertia for users to switch anytime soon. The only competition is from commercial tools like Adobe Framemaker. I hope the future will turn out to be Lyx + Asciidoctor export. If Microsoft Word ever improves their math input interface, I think it would just kill off LaTex completely. It's already almost mandatory to use for document interchange. Markdown is too limited. It has no standard for extensions - Asciidoc does. Markdown IMO is strictly for writing blog posts that are mostly text.

sebastianavina 11y ago
also, once you get used to latex (and emacs in my case), you can't find any editor or format that makes exactly what you want as latex.

j2kun 11y ago

Strictly speaking, isn't this false by virtue of latex compiling to pdf? And I have been looking hard for years and haven't found anything to replace TeX that fulfills even half my needs (as a person who does math typesetting in large documents almost daily). LaTeX has its issues, but it's the best we've got.

peatmoss 11y ago
Compiling to PDF as a display format, and being amenable to translation to another markup format that retains the structure of the original markup, are slightly different tasks. In general, I'd agree with the parent that LaTeX is something of a dead end in terms of translation. LaTeX will happily compile to PS/PDF/DVI, but translation to something like HTML is pretty reliant on using a subset of LaTeX. You can, after all, write LaTeX code to do computation. In my experience with Pandoc, there are a good number of packages that simply don't work when translating from LaTeX. The more specialized or formatting specific the package--the further you deviate from the standard Article class and simple section headers--the less likely that you'll have a good result.
- j2kun 11y ago
  A format is a format, but point taken. I've found that pandoc (and every other conversion utility) doesn't even produce useful results for LaTeX even if the LaTeX source doesn't use any complex macros or fringe packages. The problem seems not to be that LaTeX is too powerful, but rather that the point of HTML and Markdown is to be as lightweight as possible. LaTeX, on the other hand, is meant to be a useful tool for humans to use to minimize the amount of boilerplate needed to write a large technical document (in print or on the web!).

peatmoss 11y ago

This is actually kind of true. LaTeX is a Turing-complete language, which makes converting it to other things somewhat unreliable. But, there's kind of an informal subset of LaTeX that you can use and not be too bad off with Pandoc. In general, I'd like to do academic and report writing in Markdown (or Org!), but limitations of Markdown usually make it easier for me to do my writing directly in LaTeX, portability be damned. The biggest impediment for Markdown in academic / report writing I'm my opinion is the lack of internal references (things like "see figure X"). Org-mode can be converted via Pandoc much the same as markdown, but doesn't have the issue with cross-references.

semi-extrinsic 11y ago
Seconded the cross-reference gripe with Markdown. Somebody clever has to be working on that already, it's such an obvious gap. I think it would enable things like RMarkdown to reach "critical mass"