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> But I use LaTeX mainly because the resulting documents simply look better, and I imagine that’s a major selling point for many. I've encountered a real rabbi
by bscphil 7y ago
> But I use LaTeX mainly because the resulting documents simply look better, and I imagine that’s a major selling point for many.
I've encountered a real rabbit hole here, and I'm not sure what to do about it. The naive view is that LaTeX does typesetting the best way. If you want better typesetting, use LaTeX, and if you're using LaTeX, you're done.
This turns out not to be true, which is upsetting to those of us ingrained in the LaTeX ecosystem and used to thinking of it as the best way. The first thing you're likely to learn is that you need the microtype package. Without this package, kerning is not as good as it could be. (Which raises the question - if LaTeX is the final form of a typesetting language, why not do it right by default?)
But the problems don't end there. Modern OTF / TTF fonts have a lot of typesetting information that isn't fully retained if you convert the fonts to use with LaTeX. So if you want modern font support, you can't use LaTeX at all, you switch to XeTeX!
At this point you realize that the microtype package you previously learned was crucial isn't compatible with XeTeX, so you can't use it.
So it's a Catch-22. LaTeX is for people who are obsessed with perfect typesetting. But perfect typesetting can't be achieved (currently, to the best of my knowledge) in any TeX family language.
- amluto 7y agoLuaTeX seems to be the best for overall typesetting quality. You can get proper rendering of modern fonts. IMO the underlying issue is that TeX can’t really be parsed by anything other than Tex because it’s too full of macros that change the language. I think a better language would generate a well-defined AST, and different tools could compete to render it well.
- throw0101a 7y ago> But perfect typesetting can't be achieved (currently, to the best of my knowledge) in any TeX family language. What is/are the alternatives? Word? Apple Pages? LibreOffice? Markdown-via-pandoc? DocBook? FrameMaker (Windows only)? Other? Out of the box, what gives better PDF/paper output better than something that is TeX-based?
- sjy 7y agoThe standard tool for professional typesetting and book design – Adobe InDesign.
- beefhash 7y agoHasn't QuarkXPress been regaining market share due to Adobe's licensing policies? How does that hold up?
- throw0101a 7y agoIsn't QuarkXPress, like InDesign, more graphical design-focused and not so much manuscript authoring/publishing-focused?
- beefhash 7y agoThat is my understanding, too, but my understanding of this subthread was about achieving the best possible results in general, rather than just in the subset of manuscript authoring tooling.
- stenl 7y agoInDesign is great, but how do you typeset equations in it? Genuine question, as I’ve searched far and wide for a viable solution. The best I have so far is ”create in another software and insert as an image”, which is unsatisfactory.
- throw0101a 7y ago> Adobe InDesign. I've always seen ID as a graphical design tool and not as a manuscript authoring/publishing tool. Sure, you can plop a bunch of text in there, but it seems to be that it is very structure-free when it comes to layout, whereas the stuff I mentioned is more line-oriented, and therefore more focused on text. Does it have things like footnote/reference tracking? Spell- and grammar-checking?