Lout: An alternative to LaTeX?

I love Latex but it (or more specifically TeX) is showing its age. It's perfect for writing a paper given a good template but writing and debugging these templates (.cls, .sty) is unnecessarily hard. For my job (in academia), I have to update such Latex templates on a monthly basis and always end up looking at the current improvements for Latex. This updating task involves not 'writing' in Latex but 'programming' in Latex. If you are used to modern programming languages then Tex is stubborn and hard, therefore, I always have the feeling there is improvement possible (I mean, Python, Javascript, C++, ... are all easier to debug). Although people are working hard on this and doing interesting work (i.e., LuaLatex, Latex3), I feel the underlying Tex language has had its time and a more drastic change might be necessary. Remember that Tex is designed for computers with an order of magnitude less resources.

An increasingly interesting Latex replacement is, maybe surprisingly, html in combination with css and javascript. With every update of our browser the inspection and debugging tools become more powerful and every time I can track layout and programming bugs a little bit faster. With the addition of more properties targeting paged media in css3 it now becomes possible to also create nicely looking pdfs starting from html. Prince (http://www.princexml.com/), for example, is ahead of the browsers for CSS paged media properties and outputs a pdf-file directly. But also typical features for which we praise Latex are becoming available:

- Mathematical formulae: http://www.mathjax.org/

- Bibliographies: http://citationstyles.org/

- Advanced hyphenation: http://code.google.com/p/hyphenator/

Most people only use the basic commands and don't care about the underlying engine. Therefore, Latex as a 'writing' language is not too attached to the Tex 'programming' language. Pandoc (http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/) could be enough to translate such Latex code to another markup format and use another engine. (Academics tend to use advanced Latex macros only when in need of space ;-))

Mark Summerfield is known to use lout for typesetting his books:

* http://www.qtrac.eu/pyqtbook.html

* http://www.qtrac.eu/gobook.html

I played around with Lout for a good while during my brief fling with alternative typesetters; this included tracking down some of the (quite scarce at the time and still not easy to find) troff macro documentation.

It's cute and I liked that the language was generally sane but ultimately the typesetting quality was noticeably inferior to TeX even for block text; for setting mathematics Lout manages to make almost every single decision subtly wrong. Lout text quality is about comparable to troff in this way. If I'd never seen TeX it would look probably fine, or at least acceptable, but I can't stand to look at it today.

I don't really mind TeX's age since the results of typesetting with it are very nice and there is practically no alternative at least in academia. I find it a bit hard to imagine that html can do the same job. The minor (or major) inconsistencies between html engines can lead to so many different renderings from the same source and I don't think that you want that for your texts. I agree though that typography in browsers has come a long way since the early 00s and is definitely in good track. The tools you are mentioning are nice but setting them up does not seem to be any less complicated than TeX and friends (not mentioning the fact that the hyphenated result [1] from Hyphenator looks so bad; it begs for margin protrusion, but that's a different issue)

In my opinion LuaTeX (and its LaTeX counterpart) is the future of TeX. It builds upon the strong base of TeX and combines it with Lua which is a fine language for this purpose.

[1] http://hyphenator.googlecode.com/svn/tags/Version%204.0.0/Wo...

I'm curious. Why do you need to update templates so frequently? I would have expected academia to have a fairly static, albeit perhaps large, set of templates. E.g., at most one for each journal in your field, one for each conference, one for each publisher, with any of these only changing rarely.