[fireflash38]

Sphinx/rst are a nice middle ground between the simplicity of markdown and complexity of LaTeX. I used it to generate a lot of html docs for test reports. I did try pdf gen using via LaTeX and pdflatex for a bit, but stopped after the pdf was breaking the multiple thousands of pages.

And it's really tweakable, especially with html output where you can provide your own templates, or add in your own CSS/scripts even manual tags.

[PeterisP]

Providing my own templates is kind of a weird feature, because that's not really what I want (in the sense "people don't want to buy drills, they want to buy holes") - obviously that's a necessary feature, but I never ever want to make my own template, what I want instead is to have a template that does exactly what I need but that's made and maintained by someone else.

E.g. I don't care about a configurable formatting for bibliography, but I would want a pre-made template that implements the APA bibliography guidelines with all the tiny nuances correctly. I don't want to configure margins for columns, I want a template that does the IEEE formatting standard exactly. (95% compatibility doesn't work, if a single missing feature means the tool can't produce the required document because it's wrong at one spot on page 3, then I'd need to abandon the tool and pick something that works). And crucially, I want the separation between content and formatting so that I can easily take a blob of content that was formatted for one layout and just copy it in a completely different template and have it match the new formatting guidelines, e.g. automatically moving all the image captions to the other side, changing how they're numbered and referenced, etc.

Latex has all this baggage solved, almost everyone who wants a specific format from me will provide a Latex template with their weird typesetting fetishes included, and I just need to provide the content - while any upcoming tool has an uphill battle to become compatible and provide the same things, at the very least pre-made (and well made) templates for all the major formats (each discipline of science generally uses something different).