Alternative to LaTeX?

[Christoph Bier]

Sean Hammond schrieb am 11.05.2006 22:07:

> 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.

Stability, typographic quality especially with the microtypographic
extensions of pdfTeX ...

> 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.

Emacs + AUCTeX[1] provides you the most powerful interface for LaTeX
editing. Apart from that I'm very familiar with the LaTeX markup and
can't see its ugliness, one shouldn't care too much about the
source. You will provide a printed version of the formatted output
or PDF (or HTML without the typographic quality) and not the source.
With AUCTeX you need not to care about the syntax and it has nice
syntax highlighting (see screenshots). If you further use
preview-latex wiht Emacs most of the syntax can be hidden from you
(see the AUCTeX homepage).

LyX was already mentioned, but you may also try Kile as an eye candy
editor that's easy to use for beginners.

> 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.

tex4ht

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

That's not true. Have a look at the beamer class. And you can easily
change all other classes using xcolor. Look at the document in my
signature. It's produced with LaTeX (but it's in german).

> Any recommendations?

If conversion to PDF /and/ HTML is very important you could give
DocBook or tbook[3] a try. But I guess you won't like the XML
syntax. If you hate the LaTeX syntax that much you could create your
own markup that you convert to LaTeX with a $scripting_language
script. It shouldn't be too difficult ... Oh, and there is
writer2latex! This is a Java application that converts an
Openoffice.org document to LaTeX. You only have to use the styles
provided by LaTeX-article.stw.

HTH

Best,
  Christoph

[1] http://www.gnu.org/software/auctex/
[2] http://kile.sourceforge.net/
[3] http://tbookdtd.sourceforge.net/
-- 
+++ Typografie-Regeln: http://www.zvisionwelt.de/typokurz.pdf (1.4)