Alternative to LaTeX?

[Sean Hammond]

On 5/11/06, Bas van Gils <basvg at cs.ru.nl> wrote:
> > 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?

This might not work too well by email, I'm assuming a fixed-width
font, but anyway...

Well, in markdown source (which is my example of nice, if not as
powerful syntax) an itemised list looks like this:

* Item 1
* Item 2
* Item 3

In LaTeX

\begin{itemize}
\item item1
\item item2
\item item3
\end{itemize}

it's cumbersome to type and makes for not very readable source. and I
just don't see the point in it.

In markdown, emphasised text looks like this:

_emphasised text_

but in LaTeX

\emph{emphasised text}

Even the headers in markdown are more readable (much more easy to scan
the source for them):

Heading
=======

Subheading
-----------------

### Subsubheading ###

Whereas in LaTeX:

\chapter{Heading}

\section{Subheading}

\subsection{Subsubheading}

The markdown syntax lends itself much better to syntax highlighting
also, giving you lots of colourful blocks in the source that really
add to the readability, whereas syntax highlighting with LaTeX is
barely noticebable (though I suppose this could be fixed in GEdit
rather than LaTeX).

And the command line interface for LaTeX... it gives a whole pile of
apparently completely unnecessary output, which just serves to hide
any errors warnings that I actually want to see, plus I often have to
run LaTeX and BibTeX several times in succession to export one
document.

There's that and the fact that the only useful format you can export
it to is PDF. Can't get decent HTML. Can't just put the source online
because it's unreadable and there's hundreds of .aux files that it
produces etc etc.

Okay, rant over.