[igravious]

You also might want to take a look at PollPub: (http://pollenpub.com)

Discussed here on HN previously: (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10030585)

This reinforces some ideas that have been percolating in my brain for about two years. Between Gibook, PollenPub, and now Madoko it is now apparent that for the first time in its existence LaTeX is getting some competition.

What LaTeX gets right is that it produces beautiful structured academic-type (references and figures and such) documents. What it gets wrong as Gruber's Markdown has shown us is that the basic units of text should look like text and trigger markup through whitespace and intuitive but ultra-minimal markup such that without a processor it looks like an anally retentive writer produced the document. It codifies ascii practices. It's one of those ideas that until it happens you'd never think of it but afterwards you're going, "of course!". Besides Python and Markdown, do any file formats work this way?

I'm not going to make a Steve Yegge type predication but if I were I'd say that some form of scholarly markdown with multiple toolchain implementations (with git integration) is going to oust LaTeX as the structured document tool of choice. Be interested in what others have to say on the matter.

[yannis]

One of the basic tenets of TeX and LaTeX is stability, Maths has a very long shelf life! You can TeX Knuth's papers from 30 years ago and they will still produce the same output. If I were to spend 3-5 years on writing a PhD Thesis the investment in learning LaTeX is minimal compared to the rest of the effort. With a new extended markdown markup, you will still need to learn a new syntax and LaTeX markup for example if you wanted to include TikZ code.

TeX and friends has adapted over the years through external tooling, without changes to the core, for example moving from postscript to pdf, the new engines XeLaTeX and LuaTeX. Madoko is just a preprocessor for LaTeX. If you had to finally do some changes to the LaTeX code it produces it will be very difficult as this LaTeX code is not very clean. Having said this though Madoko and similar projects are great for the LaTeX community, as an entry point to newcomers and to occassional users. It is a great Project especially as is written in Koka in itself a beautiful Project.