How will Substance be an improvement on TeX/LaTeX? You can write content in LaTeX and use Pandoc to convert it to just about any other markup language. And it produces beautiful print proofs.
It's meant to be very strict about semantics (LaTeX actually isn't - it has a lot of style-related commands), and it will be extensible (so you can add your own content types). It's based based on a JSON document model that is describing a series of operations that can be used to reconstruct any document state and also enabling realtime collaboration. Authoring will take place in WYSIWYG-fashion. By having a real data-representation of the document, it can be turned into anything (e.g. LaTeX, PDF, HTML).
We use Pandoc to support a variety of output formats already.
However, we're working on a new architecture (https://github.com/substance/architecture) because we don't want to treat the symptoms of the current implementation and instead fix the problems we've identified at heart.
We use Pandoc to support a variety of output formats already.
E.g. goto: http://substance.io/michael/data-js and open the export dialogue.
However, we're working on a new architecture (https://github.com/substance/architecture) because we don't want to treat the symptoms of the current implementation and instead fix the problems we've identified at heart.