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This is the kind of side project I should have seen 100 times on HN, but I don't remember ever seeing one. Why aren't there alternatives to LaTeX out there? [0]
by dmurray 6y ago
This is the kind of side project I should have seen 100 times on HN, but I don't remember ever seeing one. Why aren't there alternatives to LaTeX out there? [0] It's OK to have respect for Donald Knuth but still accept that language design has come a long way since 1984.
[0] Of course there are plenty of alternatives to LaTeX. Microsoft Word is just one. But I mean a language that compiles to TeX.
- leephillips 6y agoYou mean other TeX formats, like ConTeXt? Or something else?
- dmurray 6y agoI think I did. I'm not familiar with ConTeXt. And maybe there are a handful of others I found here [0]: as you can tell, I don't know much about the ecosystem. Still they all seem to be described as "a system of TeX macros". Is there scope for a language that offers as different an experience to LaTeX as, say, Scala to Java or Clojurescript to Javascript? [0] https://texfaq.org/FAQ-texthings https://texfaq.org/FAQ-texthings
- leephillips 6y agoMany people, including me, use Pandoc. The markup is simpler (extended Markdown), but, more importantly, you can compile it to a variety of other markups, so it lets you repurpose your documents. And if you need more detailed control than Pandoc allows, you can embed raw LaTeX (or html). You can also extend Pandoc by writing your own “filters,”¹ which means you can sort of create your own markup language. Is something like that what you had in mind? ¹https://lee-phillips.org/panflute-gnuplot/ https://lee-phillips.org/panflute-gnuplot/
- bingerman 6y agoIn ConTeXt many people use mainly lua for scripting. Not strongly typed but still an improvement. After the initial struggle ConTeXt also feels more integrated than just a system of TeX macros but that's just my opinion. At one point patoline had promising future (ocaml is nice) but nowadays it's neither widely used nor under active development.
- msla 6y ago> Of course there are plenty of alternatives to LaTeX. Microsoft Word is just one. Only to the extent modelling clay is an alternative to CAD/CAM software and CNC tools. There might be a GUI replacement to LaTeX, but it would have to be a graphical way to manipulate structure, not a WYSIWYG system. And anyway, WYSIWYG is hardly ever WYSIWIG [1], or WYSIWTG [2]. (More like WYGIWYD [3], or YAFIYGI [4].) [1] What You See Is What I Get [2] What You See Is What They Get [3] What You Get Is What You Deserve [4] You Asked For It, You Got It
- Cyph0n 6y ago> There might be a GUI replacement to LaTeX The closest thing I know of is LyX. I actually started with it before diving into LaTeX. https://www.lyx.org/ https://www.lyx.org/
- abdullahkhalids 6y agoLet's try to scope out the magnitude of the project, you will understand. * Because the problems with LateX are mostly due to the limitations of TeX syntax. So you really have to design a new improved TeX-like language. * While, you can borrow most of the syntax of Latex for the semantic language newLatex built on top of newTex, you will have to make a lot of improvements there too. In principle, you don't have to, but in practice whoever does it, will. * Then you have to write a compiler that works on multiple platforms. * Compiler outputs PDF, a terrible format to work with anyway. * Compiler for html will be demanded too, or the project will fail. So have to write that too. * What about all the latex packages? There are hundreds of packages that will need to incorporated somehow. Or the project will fail. * Who is going to do all of this? Language design requires a really small team to make an excellent product. But the remaining project is so large, so you need a larger team for that. So now you need a larger team that will just accept what the Language design committee creates. * Once, you have created something, you have to convince scientists, some who have been using Latex for decades to switch. But scientists will only switch if journals will switch. And journals don't don't want to maintain templates in another language. In short, there are a whole host of technical and political problems that nobody really wants to tackle. The project is simply not prestigious enough. But if Ycombinator wants to help science, if they can fund a team to do this, this will probably contribute more to the advancement of science than almost anything else with a few million dollars.
- TylerE 6y agoConTeXt is what you want for practically anything where you actually care about layout. https://wiki.contextgarden.net/Main_Page https://wiki.contextgarden.net/Main_Page
- khaled 6y agoI can count like half a dozen TeX/LaTeX alternatives (SILE, Patoline, Platypus, Lout, some are more dead than the others) without even looking them up. It is easy to make a TeX/LaTeX alternative, it is hard to get people to use it. And if you mean TeX formats, there are no shortage of these https://ctan.org/topic/format https://ctan.org/topic/format.
- jfk13 6y ago> It is easy to make a TeX/LaTeX alternative I'd rather say it is easy to start a TeX/LaTeX alternative. Completing one is another matter.
- khaled 6y agoI strand by my comment. Replicate core TeX (and LaTeX) core features is easy (text layout, hyphenation, line breaking, math typesetting, etc. all are solved issue, often with many independent implementation that are as good as TeX‘s if not better), the issues that holds most people are packages and decades of TeX/LaTeX legacy.
- kevin_thibedeau 6y agoSphinx (ReST markup) has a Latex pipeline. Much more ergonomic and doesn't subject you to the problems of debugging a macro expander.