[markdennehy]

1) You run latex twice only on really large and complex documents like books, and if you're writing books (not editing, see antipope.org for details) in Word, then you need professional help.

2) Markdown and LaTeX are designed for different tasks. Next you'll be telling me that if you have a leafblower, you have no need for a chainsaw.

3) Find me the structured and annotated data streams first - and show me that the structure and annotations are correct - then lament the lack of a shell that can route them to the programs that don't interpret stdin and stdout and stderr that way anyway.

4) I use vim to write latex when I write latex, but "in a bash shell" doesn't make any sense. You fire up vim from bash, yes, but unless you're trying to do an ex-style editing session, you're not editing in the shell any more than you're editing in the kernel or the tty driver...

[skrebbel]

You're completely missing the GP's point. Whether or not LaTeX is better than MS Word for task X is besides the point. It's that LaTeX has many obvious opportunities for improvement, ways to drag it into the current age, while keeping all its fundamental strengths. As do many similarly old tools such as Bash, terminal emulators and Vim.

These improvements aren't all that difficult to imagine, but they don't happen, because, well, why? GP seems to think an obsession over backwards compatibility.

[flyrain]

Agree. Texmacs is a good idea. Unfortunately it don't attract much attention, it is still not very mature as Vim or Emacs. I hope the community could pay attention to Texmacs.

[jhasse]

LyX works more reliable in my experience: http://lyx.org

[markdennehy]

Why expend manpower and energy improving a working solution just to do so when you have so many other broken things that need fixing first? That's a fairly self-answering question. There's a reason the expression is "If it's not broken, don't fix it".

[efuquen]

We have tools that have virtually been unchanged for over 20 years. While the consistency and stability has been nice, there has been a lot of good things that have happened in software development and technology that those tools could really benefit from. You're honestly going to tell me you don't think that taking a second look at these tools and seeing how we could improve them would be a good thing?

What you're basically advocating is nobody should innovate because things are "good enough". With that sort of attitude we would never have any progress on anything.

[markdennehy]

That's not what I'm advocating. What I'm advocating is not wasting time and effort rewriting working tools just because the rewrite would be newer.

Which is not what you're saying I'm advocating.

[Ideka]

Nobody thinks it's a good idea to rewrite something just to make it "newer". The idea is to rewrite (or maybe just refactor) these tools to make them better.

It's also not "fixing what's not broken", but improving something that could... well... be improved.

[dllthomas]

While the core interaction remains unchanged, 20 years ago was before bash 2.0. The version running on my laptop, bash 4.2, was released in February 2011. The development speed hasn't been blindingly fast, but it's a fairly mature project with scripting support (so less need to extend the core than some projects have), and there have absolutely been changes even in the last 5 years.

http://tiswww.case.edu/php/chet/bash/NEWS

[Perseids]

If you fear breaking it, why not replace / revolutionize instead. See GCC vs LLVM, X vs Wayland, C++ vs Go.

[jhasse]

> C++ vs Go

Bad example :P

[flying-sheep]

markdown is perfect for forum comments, but idiotic to extend too far. if you’re a programmer wanting to write a book in markdown, you’ll find yourself thinking of markdown syntax extensions more than thinking about the book.

if you want extensibility and still a rather lightweight syntax, try restructuredtext. it has exactly one flaw compared to markdown, which is the hideous inline link syntax (which practically forces you to use named links). that makes it less suited for forum comments (where you might want to quickly inline 1-2 links), but perfect for books (where you can neatly specify your link targets below the current section)

[markdennehy]

Or you could just use LaTeX, which has been used for writing books for decades (the word you're looking for is "debugged" and the phrase is either "well understood" or "well documented").

And yes, there are efforts underway to improve it (LaTeX3) but 2e works so well, there's not been much drive there.

And if you find LaTeX is so hard, there's always LyX...

[coldtea]

>which has been used for writing books for decades

Well, mostly math and science books. Very few (if any) fancy and well typespeced books by major publishers have been made with LaTeX. I know, because I know that industry. So, while TeX was once created to be a general typesetting solution, it has been relegated to something math and cs geeks use for their papers.

>And if you find LaTeX is so hard, there's always LyX...

A not really maintained, relic of a program, that tries too hard to work around the issues raised by a backend like LaTeX that wasn't really created with such GUI control in mind.

[rwl]

>Very few (if any) fancy and well typespeced books by major publishers have been made with LaTeX. I know, because I know that industry.

What do they use, then? (I'm actually pretty curious, because I am writing a dissertation that I currently build with LaTeX, but I find it much nicer to write in Org mode. I'm doing whatever I can to avoid a hard dependency on LaTeX for the backend, and to allow exporting to multiple formats.)

Why do they use whatever typesetting solution(s) they use? Does it actually produce better/nicer output than LaTeX (for non-math text)? Does it just have nicer syntax or friendlier error messages? What's the advantage?

[Mchl]

Quark Xpress and Adobe inDesign are two I have seen being used. In the past Corel Ventura was wuite popular too.

[jhasse]

> A not really maintained, relic of a program, [...]

http://www.lyx.org/trac/timeline

[rat87]

Also http://www.ohloh.net/p/lyx

[Crito]

I have to wonder if your average publisher would even know what to do with a book written in LaTeX.

[oatmeal_coffee]

Any publisher that produces books with heavy math will know what to do with LaTeX, and if not then call a vendor that will know what to do with LaTeX.

[giantrobothead]

...if you have a leafblower, you have no need for a chainsaw...

Yes, but a leafblower combined with a chainsaw...

I don't know about you, but that's a tool I could find some uses for.

[llamaz]

Like scaring children?

[numeromancer]

It's not often that I come to laugh out loud while reading (the usually somewhat stuffy) comments on HN.

+1 coffee sputter.

[giantrobothead]

Or destroying small rodents, perhaps?

[mpnordland]

Well, depends on the size of the leaf blower. If you can blow the trees down, certainly don't bother with the chain saw!

[markdennehy]

Newton would have some things to say about that, but you wouldn't hear him because of your doppler shift.

[chris_wot]

I just choked on a glass of water. Thank you for that comment!

[callesgg]

One could easily remove then fan on the leefblower engine and add a saw blade.