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If you haven't dealt with catastrophic package conflicts, I have to wonder how involved the projects you're writing are.... and I'm somewhat surprised by the cl

If you haven't dealt with catastrophic package conflicts, I have to wonder how involved the projects you're writing are.... and I'm somewhat surprised by the claim, "...equations... just work." They "work," but god I'd love to be able to write \left(\int some stuff \\ some stuff on a new line\right) and have the parentheses, like, resize the way they would without the line-break. I don't think that Markdown is a viable replacement for LaTeX. The benefits of LaTeX over TeX are convenient font management, cross references, bibliographic databases, etc (although, if you can do without "convenient font management", TeX with eplain will get you most of what you want LaTeX for). The benefits of TeX are page layout and typography. Neither of these really fit Markdown. TeX on its own isn't much heavier than Markdown.

psychometry 12y ago
You can use LaTeX in a Markdown document and convert to PDF with a tool like Pandoc. It might be a better option when you don't care much about custom formatting.
- singingfish 12y ago
  It gets you about 90% there according to my 150 page so far PhD thesis. And a whole world of pain that I no longer have to worry about, so I can concentrate on the incredible pain of writing the last 50 pages.
- grayclhn 12y ago
  Definitely; pandoc is great and most people are better off using it than LaTeX directly. The comments above mine meant "replace" as in "displace," though and some of the important functionality of LaTeX, stuff that matters a lot when you're writing a mathematically technical book (cross-references, indexing, etc) is unlikely to be implemented in markdown. Especially since, in this context, pandoc's approach of converting the document to LaTeX doesn't help: we're still stuck with LaTeX's limitations! It would be interesting if some of these lightweight alternatives --- pandoc, org-mode, etc --- would target TeX and handle the LaTeX functionality themselves. It would obviously be more work, but it might lead to something self-contained and distinct.

psychometry 12y ago

You can use LaTeX in a Markdown document and convert to PDF with a tool like Pandoc. It might be a better option when you don't care much about custom formatting.

singingfish 12y ago
It gets you about 90% there according to my 150 page so far PhD thesis. And a whole world of pain that I no longer have to worry about, so I can concentrate on the incredible pain of writing the last 50 pages.
grayclhn 12y ago
Definitely; pandoc is great and most people are better off using it than LaTeX directly. The comments above mine meant "replace" as in "displace," though and some of the important functionality of LaTeX, stuff that matters a lot when you're writing a mathematically technical book (cross-references, indexing, etc) is unlikely to be implemented in markdown. Especially since, in this context, pandoc's approach of converting the document to LaTeX doesn't help: we're still stuck with LaTeX's limitations! It would be interesting if some of these lightweight alternatives --- pandoc, org-mode, etc --- would target TeX and handle the LaTeX functionality themselves. It would obviously be more work, but it might lead to something self-contained and distinct.