Alternative to LaTeX?

[Sean Hammond]

I've been writing a document using markdown and have just gotten to
the point where all the citations and cross-referencing are such that
I've had to bite the bullet and convert it to LaTeX.

LaTeX is such an ugly program. I don't like using it. The syntax is
ugly and the command line interface is ugly. But nothing else seems to
provide the power that LaTeX does with respect to:

* Automating citations and Bibtex
* Automating cross-referencing
* Automatic chapter and section numbers, tables of contents and title
pages, etc.

I'd really like a program with the niceness and simplicity of
something like markdown (which is really nice to work with in GEdit
with syntax highlighting) and the power of LaTeX in those key areas.

Plain text as the source file is fairly essential, and it'd be good to
be able to export to HTML and PDF. Another problem with LaTeX is that
there's no good way to get it into HTML, although pdflatex is good for
PDF.

Also I like a bit of colour. All the LaTeX classes I can find are
black and white. I hate that!

Any recommendations?

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