I've seen projects announced on and off to make a next-gen TeX or TeX-like from a clean start, but they never seem to go anywhere. I think writing a good render

I've seen projects announced on and off to make a next-gen TeX or TeX-like from a clean start, but they never seem to go anywhere. I think writing a good rendering engine is just a ton of work. Two approaches I see as plausible: 1. Use TeX as a "document assembly language" of sorts, a pure back-end rendering target not exposed to the user, and do your document markup/scripting in some other front-end language. Pandoc [1] is a start at building infrastructure for this. You can then build a new renderer too if you want, to remove the dependency on TeX, but at least in the meantime you have a pathway to producing quality output right now. 2. Build something on top of HTML+CSS (maybe also +JS). Advantages of this would be that it'd make it relatively easy to target the web with the same document source, and open-source web browsers have already sunk a ton of development time into rendering. CSS even includes a bunch of print-oriented features that in principle provide markup for most of what you might need here, though browsers for obvious reasons haven't tended to prioritize those parts. wkhtmltopdf [2] is a project aiming to build a to-print or to-PDF document workflow on top of Webkit. However imo the results are still not near TeX-replacement level. I believe the gold standard currently, if you want high-quality print out of HTML+CSS, is the proprietary PrinceXML [3]. [1] http://pandoc.org/ http://pandoc.org/ [2] http://wkhtmltopdf.org/ http://wkhtmltopdf.org/ [3] http://www.princexml.com/ http://www.princexml.com/