Alternative to LaTeX?

[Tony Arnold]

Sean,

On Thu, 2006-05-11 at 22:37 +0100, Sean Hammond wrote:

> 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.

IIRC, you need to run latex twice, followed by bibtex followed by anther
run of latex to get all the cross references right.

The first run will give undefined references for any forward references
in the document. The second run fills these in. Bibtex can then do it's
job with all the refs defined. Finally, in case things have moved pages
as a result of the bibliographic references being inserted, you need to
run latex again.

The error message also get put in the .log file, so you can browse that
at your leisure afterwards. Besides, Latex tends to stop when it hits an
error and gives you the chance to correct the error on the fly.

> 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.

The .aux files keep the reference information between runs. You don't
need to put those on line! Putting the source on line will allow people
to generate their own printable copy.

As someone else pointed out, I don't think there is anything out there
with the power of Latex and that produces such beautiful looking
documents. I really would consider sticking with it if you can.

Regards,
Tony.
-- 
Tony Arnold, IT Security Coordinator, University of Manchester,
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