Comment by moe | Hacker News Reader

Comment by moe | Hacker News Reader

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and you never have to think about presentation at all

Sadly your colorful description is not entirely accurate.

With LaTeX you're in hell immediately when you need to divert just the tiniest bit from what your \package of choice provides. Want a logo in that letterhead? Address format looks wonky? Need a nice looking table? An image in a table even? PDF output looks strangely different from dvi?

Well, any such seemingly trivial detail will be good for countless hours of scuba-diving around the ancient shipwreck of a language that is LaTeX. The little available documentation is usually only served in PDF format, sparse and contradicting. None of the packages interact with one another but most of them conflict in funny ways.

And no least the syntax and semantics of the language itself are closer to ancient greek than a modern markup- or scripting-language.

Yes, the LaTeX-output is pretty. But LaTeX must die. Take the algorithms and integrate them into software from this century please.

"any such seemingly trivial detail will be good for countless hours of scuba-diving around the ancient shipwreck of a language that is LaTeX"

Or you could just ask how to do it on #latex on freenode. For something really obscure, you might not get an answer immediately. But many times the channel can be quite helpful. Of course, there are forums, newsgroups, and mailing lists too.

That said, my experience has been that if you're doing something non-standard, it can take work to get a document to look just the way you want it. But once you do, typesetting other, similar documents becomes a breeze. And the results are fantastic.

As for "something from this century", I'd like to hear what you have in mind.

I'd like to hear what you have in mind.

Personally I've always been fond of asciidoc[1].

It even has a LaTeX-backend but I imagine the impedance mismatch must be problematic (I have not tried it).

However, realistically the problem will probably just solve itself in the midterm. Paper is rapidly going out of fashion after all, and so will anachronisms like universities requiring their students to submit content in arcane file formats.

[1] http://www.methods.co.nz/asciidoc/

Which capable open source software from this century would you recommend?

When I divert from a class or a package, I look at the source and redefine it as I desire. I have full control with LaTeX regarding the finest details. Which software gives you full control?

i like lout for general (non-mathematical) work.

http://www.qtrac.eu/lout.html

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