[brodney]

If .rtf/.doc is in such high demand, can't we output to those formats using LaTeX? I think of it as just another output alongside dvi/pdf/etc, but I know very little of the internals that would generate those additional formats.

[jarvist]

Yes, it's what I do when I submit to a journal that accepts submissions as RTF/DOC. It even has acceptable recoding for the maths.

http://latex2rtf.sourceforge.net/

[ObviousScience]

I mean, I view .DOC was worse than Latex in terms of ability to correctly render it in the future, ability to generate complex documents correctly from originals, ability to programmatically interact with it, and generally anything to do with the future.

I'm tempted to go down some XML path, because that separates concerns between the semantic structuring of the document/corpus and the rendering of it, but is that really better than just using a declarative subset of LaTeX and worrying about correctly implementing the styling scripts to render them as desired?

I have my doubts it would really be an improvement.

For context, I have a project at work coming up for which I have a bit of time to establish a toolchain and our format for things like documentation, specifications, etc. I'm open to the suggestion I should spend some of that time working on a system to make sure we don't hit a rendering issue on a technical manual in a few years when technologies change. (I'd also like to look in to literate programming tools, so semantic demarcation for automatic selection of certain kinds of elements in the document is high on my list of things to look in to, as well as relationships between and metadata in those blocks.)

I'm just not convinced that trying to replace Latex with XML or anything of that nature is actually going to make my life better in those regards, rather than being a waste of time.

(If you haven't noticed, XML is sort of the main alternative to Latex in my mind for the things I'm trying to do; perhaps there are better options.)

[UnoriginalGuy]

It would be more rational to output to HTML5, since there are insane amounts of HTML to X converters around (APIs and tools alike). PDF or Doc from HTML is utterly trivial at this stage.

[Derbasti]

I am very tempted to try to write my next publication in HTML. However, I seriously worry about things like footnotes, code examples, floating figures and references. CSS3 seems to have support for many of these, but I wonder how well the convert-to-PDF pipeline really works, and how flexible it really is.

It's bad enough if I have to convert my original source to some other format years down the line, but it is absolutely critical that I can at least create the initial PDF correctly.

[krakensden]

Math conversions tend to be lossy or involve rasterization (that inevitably ages poorly).