[StevenXC]

LaTeX does a lot of stuff - it'd take a long time to replicate all that functionality.

However, on my todo list is to write some sort of "TeX-down" wrapper for LaTeX - I want to write my dissertation in a modified form of Markdown, with inline LaTeX equations and sectioning of "theorem" and "proof"-type environments, and then run a make to generate the TeX and PDF based off of a type of TeX template. I'm familiar with Pandoc but haven't delved into it far enough to know if it's robust enough to do what I want.

[shocks]

You might like Pandoc[1].

1: http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/

[rwl]

Indeed! Or Org Mode[1].

1: http://orgmode.org/

[rmk2]

I wanted to recommend that! ;)

But to expand a little, orgmode has two modes of LaTeX-integration. The first one gets normally passed from text, so you can just use e.g. \emph{} in your orgmode source file. The other is a dedicated LaTeX-environemt (#+BEGIN_LaTeX ... #+END_LaTeX) that puts the appropriate literal LaTeX in the appropriate place within the document. I use its beamer-mode and do any tikz-graphics as literal LaTeX code within the org-file.

Though I do my normal writing simply in LaTeX, because that just deals more neatly with edge-cases, really.

[StevenXC]

> I'm familiar with Pandoc but haven't delved into it far enough to know if it's robust enough to do what I want.

:-) But thanks!

[riffraff]

RMarkdown in R Studio does markdown with embedded R code and LaTeX/MathML equations, both inline and display.

It's a surprisingly pleasant environment, though it won't probably be enough for your needs (i.e. no "theorem" env).