[mehrdada]

"We think LaTeX is still the best programming language to tell a computer how to place text on a page."

No. The output might be beautiful, but the language is most certainly not. Awful to debug.

I consider a more modern language that compiles to LaTeX and leverage its rendering engine for paper docs (while giving you sufficient control over the output) and also gives you a nice web output more pragmatic and a nicer way to approach the problem.

[hyperbovine]

Strongly agree. It's taboo to criticize TeX because of who wrote it, but let's be honest: from a usability perspective it's atrocious. Cryptic error messages, code that rivals assembler for readability ... hell even the directory layout makes no sense to me, and I've been using TeX daily for over ten years. I hold Knuth in high regard as a scientist, and there's no arguing that TeX is a technical masterpiece which revolutionized the field of mathematics--but this is not the typesetting language that's going to carry us through to the next century (I hope).

[chimeracoder]

> Strongly agree. It's taboo to criticize TeX because of who wrote it,

I assume you're referring to Knuth, but it's important to distinguish between TeX and LaTeX (the latter was written by Leslie Lamport).

The distinction between TeX and LaTeX is actually relevant here.

[tieTYT]

> The distinction between TeX and LaTeX is actually relevant here.

I know very little about both. Could you elaborate on the relevance?

[ygra]

TeX is the low-level typesetting system and programming language. LaTeX is a set of macros on top of that that try to support a more semantic approach to document layout. If you see long command names that more or less spell out what they do, it's usually LaTeX. If you see short, cryptic abbreviated commands it's usually TeX.

[AnimalMuppet]

And if you use either TeX or LaTeX instead of Lyx, you're a masochist.

[ghswa]

"No. The output might be beautiful, but the language is most certainly not. Awful to debug."

Absolutely agree but, as far as I'm aware, this "more modern alternative" does not exist.

[nas]

Lout is quite a bit saner but doesn't have much traction. It seems to be in "deep maintenance" mode now.

[andolanra]

There's Patoline[^1], which is still in a somewhat early state, and its language is quite LaTeX-ish.

[^1]: http://patoline.com/index.html

[vmarsy]

What about this ? http://dlmf.nist.gov/LaTeXML/

Having some XML output seems to make it easier to add CSS rules ?

[SeanLuke]

Combines the complexity of LaTeX with the hideousness of XML. Great.

[dyoo1979]

A system that takes ideas from http://docs.racket-lang.org/scribble/ would be most welcome.

[m_mueller]

> I consider a more modern language that compiles to LaTeX and leverage its rendering engine for paper docs (while giving you sufficient control over the output) and also gives you a nice web output more pragmatic and a nicer way to approach the problem.

I'm currently looking for exactly such a solution. Have you found any?

Sidenote: Ideal would be a language that comes with either Word or E-Pub conversion tools (in order to migrate existing word documents over). I say E-Pub because there is a relatively nice migration path from Word to there: Get on a Mac, open the Word in Pages, export to E-Pub. Can also be used to get a sane xhtml output, since it's just a zipped folder with xhtml and some images.

[theophrastus]

yep... we're all ears to alternatives. i often have to publish technical works academically and i really think the current crop of non-LaTeX solutions produce painful results. but i'm up against "we all use MSWord™ because we all use MSWord™" and there will be no getting overworked academics to invest the energy in anything that doesn't look like the tools with which they are already familiar. so... for gawdsake, find me something which isn't LaTeX which produces good equations and good page positioning without crashing and -looks- like MSWord to the non-technical computer user. i've had no luck. (and my cobbled together web nightmare rtf2text, git merge, meta LaTeX rube-goldberg device is leaking oil rapidly)

oh, and it has to play well with EndNote™ too. -sigh-

[estebank]

Have you tried Lyx[1]? It might not be as straightforward as MS Word, but if you care about the way the page looks, aren't afraid of using writing a little bit of LaTeX by hand, it works great.

[1]: http://www.lyx.org/

[theophrastus]

yes indeed. and it's certainly worthy at the postdoc level. but (quote from the LyX site): "Can I read and write Word files? Yes, but not trivially, and you should not expect to be able to collaborate with someone using Word to edit your paper. You can import Word files, and you can export Word files, but going 'roundtrip' is not workable." ...it's that "round-trip" that is currently vital.

what i really would love to see is some stable fusion of LyX and a web-collaborative-writing program like 'Gobby' (http://gobby.0x539.de/trac/) ... google-docs has been tried, but folks got scared between google-wave suddenly dying and that whole issue of corporate leaking to sinister third parties and corporate scraping

[Fomite]

"you should not expect to be able to collaborate with someone using Word to edit your paper"

This, this is death to every alternative I look at.

[wolfgke]

> but i'm up against "we all use MSWord™ because we all use MSWord™" and there will be no getting overworked academics to invest the energy in anything that doesn't look like the tools with which they are already familiar.

MSWord has the additional problem that it can't be used together with my favourite Version Control System.

[disgruntledphd2]

This post, right here, is one reason I'm glad I'm not in academia any more. I added Sweave to my rube-goldberg device though, and it leaked much, much more.

[taeric]

Emacs with org-mode works very well this way.