[jokteur]

This question may be a bit naive, but it comes from somebody who has never used asciidoc but used a lot of LaTeX to make reports, poster, presentations, ...

Why are you using asciidoc to write a book, instead of LaTeX ? I see the advantage of using this for documentation, but for an entire book ?

[41b696ef1113]

Having written my fair share of Latex, I will chime in that I despise the language. Verbose, too many special characters I need to escape (copy and pasting text becomes a chore), slow to compile, mystery number of compilation steps, and horrible debugability.

None of these are showstoppers, but quite a few paper cuts that leave me reaching for Latex only as a last resort. There are tooling and workflows one can adopt to minimize the pain, but it requires a lot of setup if I just want to get some text on a page.

I have stupidly optimistic hopes that something like [Skribilo](https://www.nongnu.org/skribilo/) would take over in this space, but I know that is foolhardy. Would require a generation of physicists and mathematicians to give up their hard-won Latex knowledge.

[StevePerkins]

LaTeX is pretty imposing for non-academic newbies. And if you're not writing a book that includes a bibliography or a lot of complex math equations, then it's arguably overkill.

On the other hand, if you already know the gist of Markdown, then you could pick up reStructuredText or AsciiDoc in less than an hour. They're more feature-rich than markdown, without adding too much squeeze for the juice.

[GordonS]

I like to use Markdown for authoring (it's a lot simpler than LaTeX!), but use Pandoc to convert to PDF (which uses a LaTeX template).

If needed, you can also sprinkle the Markdown with LaTeX, such as to enforce page breaks at specific points.

[zelphirkalt]

The answer is in my opinion the following:

You use LaTeX when you have to for some specific thing, perhaps equations, but at other times, you can stick with the simpler syntax of (AsciiDoc|reStructuredText|Org-Mode).

That's what I do at least.

[baby]

There’s no point using latex if your book has almost no formulas. If your book has a lot of them, then yes I would say using latex makes sense.

[zoomablemind]

> There’s no point using latex if your book has almost no formulas...

In a book one often needs to keep track of local references (to figures, tables, sections, etc). How this could be reasonably done in markdown flavors?

[dalai]

Asciidoc already supports that. You don’t even need to differentiate in the syntax, it knows when you are referring to a table, a figure, a section, code listing, etc.

[zelphirkalt]

And in reStructuredText you can make any place in your document a "source" and any place a "sink" of a reference. Is it the same in AsciiDoc, or are only special things like listings etc. referencable?

[qznc]

My guess: To convert it into an ebook.

[baby]

You can convert latex into ebooks I believe, it’s just completely overkill most of the time.

[Sr_developer]

LaTeX books are ugly.

We need an open source alternative to https://www.princexml.com/samples/

Or at least one not that expensive.

[GiovanniP]

> We need an open source alternative to https://www.princexml.com/samples/

TeXmacs: https://www.texmacs.org

As far as I know e.g. this book https://www.editions-ellipses.fr/accueil/4856-le-petit-pytho... has been written with TeXmacs, and antoher is in preparation by the same author. Also, Joris van der Hoeven has written a guide to TeXmacs ("The Jolly Writer") using TeXmacs