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For your use case, why were you using LaTeX in the first place? That is more surprising than finding a replacement for LaTeX.
by lupire 1y ago
For your use case, why were you using LaTeX in the first place? That is more surprising than finding a replacement for LaTeX.
- xigoi 1y agoWhat else would you use to generate PDFs from a text-based template?
- jayknight 1y ago20-ish years ago I wrote a system to do that with xslt. Would not recommend.
- sixtyj 1y agoE.g. Pandoc, universal tool…
- xigoi 1y agoDoesn’t Pandoc just use LaTeX under the hood?
- dfc 1y agoYou will be surprised to learn that pandoc uses latex for generating the PDF. It's barely hidden: https://www.pandoc.org/demo/example33/2.4-creating-a-pdf.html https://www.pandoc.org/demo/example33/2.4-creating-a-pdf.htm...
- __mharrison__ 1y agoPandoc works with typst too.
- smartmic 1y agoDITA, see my other comment on level up.
- spider-mario 1y agoReportLab?
- chromanoid 1y agoA good XSL-FO impl with docbook or something like that?
- henrebotha 1y agoAsciidoctor?
- Iwan-Zotow 1y agoDocbook
- pepa65 1y agoApart from typst, I've used weasyprint.
- Etheryte 1y agoIf you're compiling millions of documents, many with thousands of pages, you probably need something very universal. LaTeX is boring tech, off the shelf, ready to use. It might take some work to figure out the initial setup with regards to templating and everything else, but after that, you can be generally pretty content that it will handle most things you throw at it just fine.
- constantcrying 1y agoLaTeX is notoriously bad at being boring tech. It has a lot of very rough edges, especially when it comes to longer documents.
- ab5tract 1y agoAnd yet this very post positions Typst as a potential alternative to LaTeX. In other words, LaTeX is still in the top position. Personally I think ConTeXt is a far superior tool, though its documentation is always trailing quite a distance behind its current capabilities.
- sixtyj 1y agoI’d suggest LaTeX because of its strengths with tables, mathematical notation, and similar content. LaTeX notation works well for this and can be easily converted to both web and PDF formats. But compilation speed definitely needs improvement. On the other hand, how often do you actually need to compile thousands of pages into a single document? That’s really an edge case.
- smartmic 1y agoI am currently preparing to switch to DITA. The learning curve is steeper at the beginning, but I find the overall concept of topic-oriented, information-typed authoring with content reuse very attractive. Some people might say that writing in XML is annoying, but it isn't if you have a decent XML editor. In my case, it is Emacs nXML mode. Customisation is possible with DITA-OT [1] and plugins, and yes, it is also based on XSLT. Overall, I think DITA is an industry-proven XML powerhouse. It may be boring, but it has huge potential for anyone with advanced documentation requirements. [0] https://dita-lang.org/dita/archspec/base/introduction-to-dita https://dita-lang.org/dita/archspec/base/introduction-to-dit... [1] https://www.dita-ot.org/ https://www.dita-ot.org/