Comment by effie | Hacker News Reader

Comment by effie | Hacker News Reader

What science needs, I believe, is not another tool for making TeX more usable for information interchange, but a simple (much simpler than LaTeX, whose complexity and user experience is terrible), web-oriented standard language for typing in libre scientific and technical documents that browsers would support (or it can be translated to valid HTML+CSS seamlessly). Web documents are cheaper and more accessible to people, we should concentrate on those. I don't know if there is usable language and platform of this kind already. When we'll have that, tools for converting web documents to other less important formats such as paper-printable ones can be created.

Web documents are cheaper and more accessible, but there's still a quite large usage of print documents, so at least I, as a document author, don't want to commit to a "web-only" toolchain without a good to-print workflow also being available.

It's possible for HTML+CSS to also provide a good to-print workflow, but I don't think it's there yet, at least using open-source tools. I have heard PrinceXML can produce good results, with sufficient control over the print layout to make HTML+CSS usable as a print-oriented markup language. But between the cost, and the prospect of becoming dependent on a proprietary tool with no obvious alternatives, I haven't tried it.

PrinceXML is definitely the best tool, but there are a couple similar commercial alternatives and wkhtmltopdf have become a decent open source solution as long as you want basic docs.

Agreed. I would use latex for everything but I need to work with collaborators who are only used to writing in Word with track changes. Something that would allow me to write in latex then still share for editing with less tech savvy people would be wonderful.

Have you tried pandoc for converting LaTeX to markdown or word? It generally works well unless you have a lot of equations or references.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com