8 ms·

Lout: An alternative to LaTeX?

• rflrob 15y ago
  Even if there aren't pre-made bibliography styles, is there a bibliography system at all, comparable to something like BibTeX?
• duaneb 15y ago
  The equation builder looks downright painful to use.
  • zem 15y ago
    yeah, i find lout pretty pleasant for non-scientific stuff, but when it comes to a bunch of equations and references you can't beat latex. one thing the blog post didn't mention is that it is really easy to machine-generate lout (indeed, that was one of its design goals), so it provides a good option to quickly add ps and pdf output to a project.
• JadeNB 15y ago
  Kingston has a successor language, called Nonpareil, which seems to have been in development for quite some time: http://sydney.edu.au/engineering/it/~jeff/nonpareil http://sydney.edu.au/engineering/it/~jeff/nonpareil. I love (La)TeX, but I'd also love to see viable alternatives in place. However, I've never heard a success story (for example, "I wrote a book in it and it was pleasant"—or even "… a paper … painless"!). In fact, this is the first story I've heard of anyone (other than Kingston & co. himself) even seriously trying it. Is there a Lout / Nonpareil showcase out there somewhere?
  • adaszko 15y ago
    Mark Summerfield is known to use lout for typesetting his books: * http://www.qtrac.eu/pyqtbook.html http://www.qtrac.eu/pyqtbook.html * http://www.qtrac.eu/gobook.html http://www.qtrac.eu/gobook.html
• zdw 15y ago
  In the world of "here's a preprocessor before LaTeX", pandoc tends to stand out as you can do Markdown or similar with inline LaTeX or HTML: http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/ http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/
  • dfc 15y ago
    "tends to stand out"? Understatement of the year. The closest preprocessor to pandoc that I know of is org-mode and the output is not nearly as nice and its emacs specific.
• tangus 15y ago
  I keep revisiting Lout every couple of years, and they keep not supporting UTF-8, which makes it unusable or me. It's a shame, because it looks really nice.
• nullflux 15y ago
  Semi-unrelated: Does anyone recommend a good LaTeX tutorial/book?
  • philwebster 15y ago
    One of my professors has a number of video tutorials which can be found here: http://castingoutnines.wordpress.com/2010/02/04/12-videos-for-getting-latex-into-the-hands-of-students/ http://castingoutnines.wordpress.com/2010/02/04/12-videos-fo...
  • Lewisham 15y ago
    The Not So Short Guide To LaTeX has always been a godsend to me, and it's free.
  • dbaupp 15y ago
    There is a very reasonable wikibook: https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX
  • orjan 15y ago
    "The LaTeX Companion" proved very useful when I wrote my thesis. [http://www.amazon.com/LaTeX-Companion-Techniques-Computer-Typesetting/dp/0201362996/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1332934615&sr=1-3 http://www.amazon.com/LaTeX-Companion-Techniques-Computer-Ty...]
  • cschmidt 15y ago
    I loved More Math Into LaTeX. Don't worry about the "more" in the title, that just represents a new edition. I used it to learn LaTeX from scratch. http://www.amazon.com/More-Math-Into-LaTeX-Edition/dp/0387322892 http://www.amazon.com/More-Math-Into-LaTeX-Edition/dp/038732...
• tuananh 15y ago
  I personally believe ConTeXt has more potential over this.
• wannesm 15y ago
  I love Latex but it (or more specifically TeX) is showing its age. It's perfect for writing a paper given a good template but writing and debugging these templates (.cls, .sty) is unnecessarily hard. For my job (in academia), I have to update such Latex templates on a monthly basis and always end up looking at the current improvements for Latex. This updating task involves not 'writing' in Latex but 'programming' in Latex. If you are used to modern programming languages then Tex is stubborn and hard, therefore, I always have the feeling there is improvement possible (I mean, Python, Javascript, C++, ... are all easier to debug). Although people are working hard on this and doing interesting work (i.e., LuaLatex, Latex3), I feel the underlying Tex language has had its time and a more drastic change might be necessary. Remember that Tex is designed for computers with an order of magnitude less resources. An increasingly interesting Latex replacement is, maybe surprisingly, html in combination with css and javascript. With every update of our browser the inspection and debugging tools become more powerful and every time I can track layout and programming bugs a little bit faster. With the addition of more properties targeting paged media in css3 it now becomes possible to also create nicely looking pdfs starting from html. Prince (http://www.princexml.com/ http://www.princexml.com/), for example, is ahead of the browsers for CSS paged media properties and outputs a pdf-file directly. But also typical features for which we praise Latex are becoming available: - Mathematical formulae: http://www.mathjax.org/ http://www.mathjax.org/ - Bibliographies: http://citationstyles.org/ http://citationstyles.org/ - Advanced hyphenation: http://code.google.com/p/hyphenator/ http://code.google.com/p/hyphenator/ Most people only use the basic commands and don't care about the underlying engine. Therefore, Latex as a 'writing' language is not too attached to the Tex 'programming' language. Pandoc (http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/ http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/) could be enough to translate such Latex code to another markup format and use another engine. (Academics tend to use advanced Latex macros only when in need of space ;-))
  • adrianN 15y ago
    Due to its age, there is a massive codebase in TeX/LaTeX. There is literally a package for everything. It would be a massive undertaking to replace the TeX system by something that isn't downwards compatible. And since the vast majority of LaTeX users don't get to see much of the underlying mess the pressure to do so is rather small.
• gchpaco 15y ago
  I played around with Lout for a good while during my brief fling with alternative typesetters; this included tracking down some of the (quite scarce at the time and still not easy to find) troff macro documentation. It's cute and I liked that the language was generally sane but ultimately the typesetting quality was noticeably inferior to TeX even for block text; for setting mathematics Lout manages to make almost every single decision subtly wrong. Lout text quality is about comparable to troff in this way. If I'd never seen TeX it would look probably fine, or at least acceptable, but I can't stand to look at it today.
• stewbrew 15y ago
  Lout is around since the early 1990s. The fact that it didn't take off probably indicates that it's no viable alternative. Do they really still require users to explicitly mark paragraphs?
• vilya 15y ago
  I wonder if Sphinx[1] or something like it could be a good replacement for LaTeX? It would need a better typesetting engine for PDFs, but the authoring experience with it is pretty nice. [1] http://sphinx.pocoo.org/ http://sphinx.pocoo.org/
  • deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
  • dfc 15y ago
    Sphinx is cool for what it is but it is not even a zygote of a potential latex replacement...
• nyar 15y ago
  "its chief advan­tages seem to be speed and size: a down­load of the entire sys­tem is less than 1 MB, and takes around 5 MB when installed" I have a 500GB hard drive.
  • Luyt 15y ago
    ...and I have a 64GB SSD drive. Everything counts, in large amounts ;-)
• leif 15y ago
  writing math in this has got to be hell...especially when 'sup' is a typesetting keyword
• suckerpunch 15y ago
  The output of Latex is so annoyingly good that I would use it to make me a cup of tea if I could ("there's a package for that", comes the faint cry). I use it for essays, reports, and even our Ukulele Society's songbook. Versatile it is. But the problem is basically this: You have to close your eyes, cover your ears and hum loudly when installing and compiling, because if you thought about the error messages, the distro size and all the binaries involved, you'd probably wish you were dead. Nothing, no quality output justifies a piece of software like this, it's like the elephant in the filesystem. I have nothing but admiration for the people who put this together, because I couldn't fit a mental model of the Tex system into two of my brains.
• rbehrends 15y ago
  I have been using Lout occasionally. It is a perfectly capable typesetting systems, with both advantages and disadvantages over TeX/LaTeX/ConTeXt/etc. The average user will probably want to stick with TeX and friends, but there are situations where Lout is a good alternative. The primary advantages are its very small size and its tight integration with PostScript. The small size means that is very easily deployed (such as when you need something to generate documents); the tight integration with PostScript means that it is relatively easy (assuming you know a bit of PostScript) to augment the output with graphics (I have even, for example, sometimes used Lout to generate EPS diagrams to embed in LaTeX documents). Much easier than using Metafun, for example. The main disadvantages are that it cannot do everything that the TeX engine does and that it has relatively few contributors. For example, there's no way (other than manually inserting column breaks) to automatically generate balanced columns. And while non-rectangular paragraphs are possible in principle (such as for drop capitals or flowing text around images), this generally requires sacrificing hyphenation (and can be non-trivial for the non-expert user). Lout also has fewer people contributing to/using it, so it does not have the rich ecosystem of TeX and friends (e.g., while you can use it to generate slides, there are more and more powerful LaTeX styles available). Integration with bibliography tools and sites (that generally expect/produce BibTeX format) can be another matter. With respect to typesetting quality, it uses the same line-breaking algorithm as standard TeX; it does not have the microtypography features of pdfTeX. For typesetting anything mathematics (beyond basic math), TeX is generally superior (which should not be surprising, given the effort Knuth put into getting that right). Also, while modifying/creating LaTeX packages these days is not exactly child's play, Lout poses some challenges of its own; its functional typesetting language (used both to describe the content and how that content is laid out via so-called galleys) can be difficult to grasp for a novice.
• mad44 15y ago
  These days I do most of my LaTeXing as an export from org-mode in emacs. Org-mode allows me to use convenient markup notation, and uses sensible defaults when exporting to LaTeX. It keeps me happy, especially when exporting slides to Beamer, LaTeX based presentation tool.
  • beza1e1 15y ago
    Off-topic: Generating slides from an outliner like Org-mode produces those ugly bullet points en mass, doesn't it? The upside is of course, that they are easy and fast to generate. Why do you need that?
    • dfc 15y ago
      Why do you need what? Also check out org-beamer if you want to stick with org-mode. If you want an alternative try pandoc. It supports 4 or 5 web presentation formats and beamer.
• njoh 15y ago
  I think inventing typesetting languages that compile to TeX might partially solve the problem and make the whole typesetting experience more pleasant, since TeX is already a capable typesetting system, and has a rich ecosystem, and TeX engines are already capable of producing high-quality documents, but the hard part is writing TeX documents. So what haml is to HTML, or say CoffeScript to javascript, a new language could be to TeX. so inventing new, easier to use typesetting languages that use TeX as an underlying system might be a good solution..
• indubitably 15y ago
  I'd be curious to know if there any CSS/HTML experiments going on with typesetting academic papers. LaTeX may be beautiful and powerful but it may also be too hard. And it really doesn't handle very good HTML output -- aren't we supposed to be on the internet already?