You're right in that: LaTeX doesn't suffer from that criticism, and LaTeX is pretty cool, particularly in terms of the quality of the output you get. This syste

You're right in that: LaTeX doesn't suffer from that criticism, and LaTeX is pretty cool, particularly in terms of the quality of the output you get. This system will very likely end up with a LaTeX filter for print rendering. Limitations of LaTeX for what I want: 1) It does too much - I want to be able to have documents generated once and then offer on multiple outputs. I can't do that if people use features of the platform that go beyond the 'web renderer'. The featureset you need for the save format of a document production system is actually very low. You need to be able to capture five grades of headings, support two types of emphasis, ordered and unordered lists that can nest, tabular data. I don't think anything else is needed. So in this sense, of existing technologies docbook is a lot closer to what I need than LaTeX. 2) Whatever system you end up coming up with, it needs to be able to support Microsoft Word as a frontend because users are sold on that interface, although they really don't care what goes on underneath. While I could have my Word plugin generating LaTeX, it would be much more sensible to have it turned into an intermediate format of simple XML and then transform into LaTeX for what it's good at. Good suggestion. It does have a place in the plan :)