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FTA: > LaTeX input files are proprietary to LaTeX, just as .doc is Word. I must be missing something --- LaTex .tex documents are written in plain ASCII text

by dctoedt 12y ago

FTA: > LaTeX input files are proprietary to LaTeX, just as .doc is Word. I must be missing something --- LaTex .tex documents are written in plain ASCII text files with pseudo-English tags indicating generally how text is to be processed (italics, bold, etc.). FTC: > Everybody is free to write a parser for .tex files and use it for whatever reason they want... Exactly. Pandoc supposedly converts from LaTex into many other formats (although I haven't personally tried any of those particular conversions).

habitue 12y ago
He means "de-facto proprietary" in that there is no standard for the output of LaTeX, except whatever LaTeX outputs. That means anyone who wants to build anither version has a huge amount of work to do endlessly duplicating the quirks of the original implementation. Imagine HTML being defined as "whatever Firefox does". You're chasing a very complicated moving target and you'll always be behind if you aren't just copying the source wholesale. As to your second point, he mentions LaTeX converters in the article, saying you must write in a very restricted subset of LaTeX for it to convert properly. Obviously, pandoc doesn't have any way to turn everything LaTeX does into a markdown file. That being said, I personally like LaTeX a lot. But I wanted to clarify the points the author was making.