TeX Live 2017 released

Lout was the inspiration for LILArt (see http://runtimeterror.com/rep/lilart) which has a @-based syntax. The idea is that you define a document in a tree-like format with nodes, properties and such (similar to XML but not as verbose) and then you pass it to a LIL (a scripting language similar to Tcl) script to... do stuff with the nodes. You call lilart like "lilart -f file.ladoc" where simply makes lilart to load the ".lil" script and call its "process-tree" function, passing in the root node.

The reason i made it was that i liked Lout's syntax but i wanted something closer to DocBook that i could convert to other formats (Lout only works with printed output). I think the closest is GNU Texinfo, but even that was too specific and it needs way more handholding for the underlying output than i'd like. Texinfo defines its node types (and its format isn't really a tree nor very generic) whereas LILArt's node types are just a convention and in practice the scripts can define any sort of node.

Having said that, LILArt is really a backburner project which i only touch wherever i need to write a document in more than one format. The default LILArt scripts can output groff macros for conversion to PS and PDF (i used that because it is already installed in many systems, including the iMac i used at the time, and it is small to download for where it isn't available) and HTML in several variations, like semantic HTML, "simple" HTML for systems like Java help and LHelp, HTML for conversion to mobi and plain text and "naked" HTML for use with QuHelp (a program that i wrote some years ago to convert naked HTML files to full web-based help sites with search). I also had a Texinfo target that could be used to make info files, PDF and PS through TeX and CHM files for a while but it was buggy and decided to rewrite it at some point.

However i only touch that rarely when i need it so i don't really recommend its use as it is right now (the processor is more or less done, but the scripts aren't very well thought out since i was doing stuff as i needed them and they need a bit of a cleanup and some nodes are needlessly verbose - the DocBook inspiration - and need some abbreviation aliases).

It's amazing how many different and dissimilar components go into a TeX distribution like TeX Live:

- At the base, there is Donald Knuth's program `tex`, itself written in a strange language (WEB) that is essentially an ad-hoc macro-expansion system (not used by many others, and not even by Knuth today, who prefers CWEB), and compiles (via `tangle`) to a dialect/version of Pascal (“Pascal-H”) for which a compiler hasn't existed for years. [It also "compiles" (via `weave`) to the printed book TeX: The Program]

- Then there is LaTeX, an elaborate set of macros written originally by Leslie Lamport (another Turing award winner) and later by a team, to be interpreted by the TeX program, which was never designed by its original creator for such elaborate programming.

- There are entire new programs (aka TeX engines) like pdfTeX and XeTeX, created by editing the original `tex.web` in different directions.

- There are the binaries of all these programs, compiled using `web2c`, a program written solely for converting all these WEB programs written in (basically) Pascal into C code, which is neither an arbitrary Pascal-to-C converter nor even an arbitrary WEB-to-C converter.

- There is LuaTeX, a manual rewrite of TeX in C, embedding a Lua interpreter and adding many hooks and extensions.

- There are thousands of macro packages written by thousands of people of varying levels of skill and foresight, on top of TeX, LaTeX, and other macro packages themselves: essentially everything on CTAN (which was inspiration for Perl's CPAN, and ultimately many languages' package repositories like Python's PyPI etc.)

And all this without even mentioning ConTEXt, Metafont, MetaPost, BibTeX, Kpathsea, various assorted utilities, graphics drivers…

Anyone who wants everything “just right” and is particular about what that means – and doesn’t have to make more than 2 documents in a particular template (or maybe even if they do) – should just start with InDesign, and save hours of trouble.

Where LaTeX shines is for cases where you don’t really care about the details of the layout, but just want someone else to handle it all in a somewhat sensible way when you hand them a basic manuscript, and not shit all over itself the way MS Word does on a regular basis.

LaTeX is great for generic college papers where you don’t have figures and don’t have time to worry about the layout. By contrast it’s a huge pain in the butt for something like magazines, coffee-table books, or posters.

(It’s also the best way to typeset mathematical formulas, of course.)

A now also the recently announced tectonic [0]. I also remember watching a talk about a clojure re-implementation but I think I never saw it released anywhere.

[0]: https://tectonic-typesetting.github.io/en-US/

I'm typesetting a series of novels with LaTeX and memoir and I share your pain. I didn't have much trouble with fonts (fontspec is pretty awesome compared to the old TeX way), but things like typesetting on a grid, that was difficult.

I'm now reading on ConTeXt and it seems to be a much more adequate TeX format. For one thing, it supports grid typesetting! LaTeX's philosophy is to separate style and content, leaving the style to "someone else". It seems that ConTeXt's philosophy is to separate style and content, but still make it easy for the user to choose the style. It's also more integrated: comprehensive core, few third-party packages, meaning less compatibility issues (but less choice too). I'll definitely try it for my next project.