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I am really desperate for an alternative.
troff exists.
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In typical Microsoft fashion it has enough to check the box but not enough to actually be useful. Does it generate diffs/patches that ultimately can be used to reconstruct the document? Can I take a document and apply a patch and get exactly the same as you get? Can I reorder and edit patches? The answer is no.
Interesting, I didn't know Tex users would want those sort of facilities. I've used Word with track changes in enterprise environments and it does the job, I've never had to use patches for it though (and wouldn't).
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> why not just use Acrobat Does Acrobat have any typesetting capabilities? I thought another app did that and just finalised through Acrobat.
There's acrobat editor, though its more limited than I assumed it seems.
Something I've wondered, and the Tex users here can probably answer - why not just use Acrobat or Word for math? Does it not support something?
Another pro is that I can use git for tracking changes
I am really desperate for an alternative.
I've used texmacs (unrelated to TeX despite the name) with good success. Never went particularly deep into it though.
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I work with TeX quite a lot and I can't even really understand intuitively the principles of the language design let alone the grammar. Like 15 years later and I'm still copy and pasting spells. I'd love to see an CST of my document and figure out why I'm writing the characters I'm writing!
My experience with TeX is a complete opposite. I feel like I can do pretty much anything in plain TeX, with a very good feel of what it is doing in its 'guts'. I wrote parsers in compilers in pure TeX (the latter was admittedly a silly academic exercise). It took a very thorough reading of 'The TeXbook' but after that I am constantly amazed at how deliberate and tasteful Knuth's choices were. TeX is simply ... elegan…
Context-free languages are the standard for decades now. They haven't been in the very early days of computing due to a lack of formal education of programmers and because they come with a certain, but tiny, memory requirement.
What Knuth did with TeX was a violation of KISS. There's no good reason, but several downsides, to mix markup, code, and interpreter state like this.
TeX is one of those bits of software that's so complex to replace, it'll take another few decades (and likely a few false starts) before we can get there. The fundamentals of TeX's typesetting are amazing, but everything else is just bolted on. You'd probably want to rebuild it with its own, custom language, perhaps inspired more by modern XML/markdown rather than the old TeX language. The biggest problem that we're…
MathML is not really for human to type, just as you rarely type long XML by hand. I don’t see the point of MathML at all.
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TeX itself is not really complex. The implementation is fine. The hard part is the ecosystem. Any contender is going to face a daunting task of explaining why adopters should throw away 50 years of collective work of thousands of people that went into TeX packages in CTAN. Math notation is at best 1% of the reasons why people use TeX. Packages are.
I think the argument comes down to complexity. Getting Markdown --> Pandoc featureset up to a reasonable fidelity is the next stage IMO, especially if Markdown can be made to support the most common downloaded TeX extension packages.
Feel free to come up with something new that supports Markdown as a subset or overlaps with Markdown.
Does anyone use ConTeXt these days? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ConTeXt