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Because I think LaTeX is a syntactically outdated language that gets in the way of your thoughts, I would love a markup language that can be used for PDFs (arti

Because I think LaTeX is a syntactically outdated language that gets in the way of your thoughts, I would love a markup language that can be used for PDFs (articles, etc) instead of tex, but has 1) a markdown-based, lightweight syntax 2) a CSS-like interface for specifying styles 3) still the possibility to use all the advanced features of tex (eg. bibtex) when they are needed. This might be a good starting point, provided the result can be rendered into PDF in a sound and consistent way.

HerrMonnezza 5y ago
I find that the experience of writing (La)TeX depends a lot on what you are using to write it. For me, Emacs' AuC-TeX [1] is nearly perfect: it has shortcuts and autocompletion for almost all the environment names and commands, inline preview, BibTeX searches (via RefTeX), and a number of other minor features that make it easy to write LaTeX. Honestly, I wish that other text-writing modes (like markdown-mode) would implement the interface and functionality of AuC-TeX and not the other way round. As for the syntax: I love Markdown for writing very simple text content, but as soon as you need to do something just a little more complicated it becomes awkward (e.g., table entries that span multiple paragraphs) and some task are simply impossible (e.g. referencing a list item by label value, the way you do it with TeX's `\label` and `\ref`). The programmability of TeX-based systems is actually a great thing that lets you write shorter documents and push many aesthetics decisions to a `.sty` file (e.g., you can at any time change your mind on how `\vector{u}` should be rendered). [1]: https://www.gnu.org/software/auctex/ https://www.gnu.org/software/auctex/
OptionX 5y ago
The closest thing I can think of would be AsciiDoc. Though not made specifically for pdf you can render it to anything with relative ease, though the same could be said for markdown itself.

HerrMonnezza 5y ago

I find that the experience of writing (La)TeX depends a lot on what you are using to write it. For me, Emacs' AuC-TeX [1] is nearly perfect: it has shortcuts and autocompletion for almost all the environment names and commands, inline preview, BibTeX searches (via RefTeX), and a number of other minor features that make it easy to write LaTeX. Honestly, I wish that other text-writing modes (like markdown-mode) would implement the interface and functionality of AuC-TeX and not the other way round. As for the syntax: I love Markdown for writing very simple text content, but as soon as you need to do something just a little more complicated it becomes awkward (e.g., table entries that span multiple paragraphs) and some task are simply impossible (e.g. referencing a list item by label value, the way you do it with TeX's `\label` and `\ref`). The programmability of TeX-based systems is actually a great thing that lets you write shorter documents and push many aesthetics decisions to a `.sty` file (e.g., you can at any time change your mind on how `\vector{u}` should be rendered). [1]: https://www.gnu.org/software/auctex/ https://www.gnu.org/software/auctex/

OptionX 5y ago

The closest thing I can think of would be AsciiDoc. Though not made specifically for pdf you can render it to anything with relative ease, though the same could be said for markdown itself.