Actually, HTML is nearly there. I tried to replicate one of my ACM-style LaTeX papers into HTML and convert it to pdf via browser. Biggest problem: position the

Actually, HTML is nearly there. I tried to replicate one of my ACM-style LaTeX papers into HTML and convert it to pdf via browser. Biggest problem: position the copyright box on the first page, left column, bottom and flow the text around it. There are minor problems with browsers (e.g. Chrome does not support column-count CSS in print output), but hopefully that will improve over time. I did not tackle the bibliography problem: Import bibtex into HTML and correctly link citations into bibliography. That will be some work. Maybe PrinceXML can do it, but it is not Free Software. My proof-of-concept HTML version: http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/acm_html/test.html http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/acm_html/test.html You can spot a few LaTeX commands, which got copy&pasted. ;) My conclusion: HTML is useable for pdf generation, but is not sufficient to replace LaTeX.