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> LaTeX input files are a proprietary format. This is a really misleading statement, especially since it comes after him stating that "LaTeX is free in both s

> LaTeX input files are a proprietary format. This is a really misleading statement, especially since it comes after him stating that "LaTeX is free in both senses". LaTeX input files apparently lack a standard specification, which is admittedly bad, but then again, so do the input files of many programming languages that some people on HN are writing on a daily basis[0]. This is not the same thing as them being proprietary; anyone can write a new LaTeX parser and there is nothing stopping them legally or technically from doing so. [0] I may be wrong, but I believe PHP and Ruby both fall under this category. Markdown is another example (everyone parses it in a slightly different way, and while it's generally consistent, there are definitely warts around the edge cases where it's clear that Markdown would benefit from having a standard).

revelation 12y ago
By his definition, every document ever written in any DSL is in a propietary format. Personally, I'm perfectly happy if I can open a document in a text editor and get the content that way. That obviously works perfectly fine with LaTeX, it doesn't work at all with doc.
- lmm 12y ago
  > By his definition, every document ever written in any DSL is in a propietary format. I think that's basically true. The good formats are formats that have a) a standard but more importantly b) multiple independent implementations. > Personally, I'm perfectly happy if I can open a document in a text editor and get the content that way. That obviously works perfectly fine with LaTeX, it doesn't work at all with doc. You can get the content, but not the formatting, which was presumably important if you were using latex. It's pretty trivial to extract the plain text from a word doc too.