I like Latex (Math/CS background), but I would definitely like to try some alternatives (like Asciidoc discussed in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8509062

I like Latex (Math/CS background), but I would definitely like to try some alternatives (like Asciidoc discussed in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8509062 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8509062 ). The problem is I never can tell which Markdown/Docbook inspired systems actually have working implementations and which ones are hot air. I don't want to end up with a big SGML mess that I can't do anything with or have to edit CSS just to render a book in a standard format. Any recommendations/tutorials? My ideal system would allow something like literate-programming/sweave/knitr. The notation could be any of markdownish/xml/ascii. I would have to be able to do call-outs/annotations on listings with tags (not insane/fragile region specifications). I need figures and charts. And I would have to be able to produce at least HTML5, PDF, epub, mobi. And I need support for footnotes, endnotes, tables of contents, indexes, and bibliographies. Flexibility in back-ends (like being able to render to Latex) would also be good. Edit: the sweave/knitr thing I can live without (could probably arranged a pre-process to do this).