Alternative to LaTeX?

[Bas van Gils]

On Thu, May 11, 2006 at 09:07:54PM +0100, Sean Hammond wrote:
> 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.
 
always a good idea ;-)

> LaTeX is such an ugly program. I don't like using it. The syntax is
> ugly and the command line interface is ugly. 

Umm... can you clarify? What's so ugly about the syntax? I would agree if you
wrote that it takes some getting used to but the syntax actually makes a lot
of sense. \section{Foo} makes a section with heading foo and \cite{bar}
references some article with key bar. In mathmode $\frac{a}{b}$ makes a
franction and so on...


> 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.

Yup, you can't beat it there. Also include:
- layout/display of formula's
- handling large indexes
- scripting in the document
- automatіc generation of layout depending on pagesize / file type selected
- etcetera.

> 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.

I agree with you on this one. I'm currently reading the “LaTeX web companion”
and expect to find valuable clues there...
 
> Also I like a bit of colour. All the LaTeX classes I can find are
> black and white. I hate that!
> 
> Any recommendations?

Hehe, well, not sure about color because I'm not a big fan of color in
professional writings myself. As for LaTeX alternatives... I haven't found
any. It took some getting used to but once I mastered the syntax I decided I
never want to drop it again. Ever. Period. The output is just too good
(especialy when math stuff is in your documents).

g'luck hunting for alternatives. My advice... stick to LaTeX

Hope this helps

  Bas


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<Bas.vanGils at cs.ru.nl> - GPG Key ID: 2768A493  -  http://www.cs.ru.nl/~basvg
Radboud University Nijmegen Institute for Computing and Information Sciences