3 ms·

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

• 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!).