In the world of "here's a preprocessor before LaTeX", pandoc tends to stand out as you can do Markdown or similar with inline LaTeX or HTML: http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/
"tends to stand out"?
Understatement of the year. The closest preprocessor to pandoc that I know of is org-mode and the output is not nearly as nice and its emacs specific.
I wonder if Sphinx[1] or something like it could be a good replacement for LaTeX? It would need a better typesetting engine for PDFs, but the authoring experience with it is pretty nice. [1] http://sphinx.pocoo.org/
I wonder if Sphinx[1] or something like it could be a good replacement for LaTeX? It would need a better typesetting engine for PDFs, but the authoring experience with it is pretty nice. [1] http://sphinx.pocoo.org/
Sphinx is cool for what it is but it is not even a zygote of a potential latex replacement...
These days I do most of my LaTeXing as an export from org-mode in emacs. Org-mode allows me to use convenient markup notation, and uses sensible defaults when exporting to LaTeX. It keeps me happy, especially when exporting slides to Beamer, LaTeX based presentation tool.
Off-topic: Generating slides from an outliner like Org-mode produces those ugly bullet points en mass, doesn't it? The upside is of course, that they are easy and fast to generate. Why do you need that?
Why do you need what?
Also check out org-beamer if you want to stick with org-mode. If you want an alternative try pandoc. It supports 4 or 5 web presentation formats and beamer.
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…
I tried [0]. Firefox does an ok page layout, if you print it. I did not try Prince. One big TODO is the copyright notice in the bottom left column first page. Two column-wide figures are also an issue. Thanks for citationstyles.org. When i have time, I'll try to integrate that. [0] http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/acm_html/test.html
Prince already supports the new page floats attributes. A copyright notice in the ACM style works for me with "float: bottom;". The w3 css3 draft [1] has some more examples, also about two column-wide figures.
I haven't looked into why TeX distributions (looking at you TeX Live) are so big these days, because it mostly doesn't matter. I suspect that I could take almost everything I write today and typeset it on your Amiga without too many problems.
You don't know why TL is so big? Because it includes everything on CTAN that is compatible with DFSG. CTAN is an enormous archive containing numerous packages that do the same thing slightly different. How many packages are there like booktabs/tabulary/tabularyx/longtable etc? How many enumitem like packages are there? What is so confusing?
"TL is big because it includes everything possible" isn't the confusing part, what's confusing is why it has doubled in size every couple of years. Is that all from CTAN? The other why could be: why do they include everything when they have a perfectly good package manager? I don't know if TL will do on-demand loading, but MikTeX on Windows did so years ago, so it should be possible.
You don't know why TL is so big? Because it includes everything on CTAN that is compatible with DFSG. CTAN is an enormous archive containing numerous packages that do the same thing slightly different. How many packages are there like booktabs/tabulary/tabularyx/longtable etc? How many enumitem like packages are there? What is so confusing?
"TL is big because it includes everything possible" isn't the confusing part, what's confusing is why it has doubled in size every couple of years. Is that all from CTAN? The other why could be: why do they include everything when they have a perfectly good package manager? I don't know if TL will do on-demand loading, but MikTeX on Windows did so years ago, so it should be possible.
The documentation for the different languages is huge. Plus all of the architectures. When I install I only install english/linux-x86-64 and its not that big. Plus fonts do not compress that well..
I tried [0]. Firefox does an ok page layout, if you print it. I did not try Prince. One big TODO is the copyright notice in the bottom left column first page. Two column-wide figures are also an issue. Thanks for citationstyles.org. When i have time, I'll try to integrate that. [0] http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/acm_html/test.html
Prince already supports the new page floats attributes. A copyright notice in the ACM style works for me with "float: bottom;". The w3 css3 draft [1] has some more examples, also about two column-wide figures. [1] http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-gcpm/#page-floats
I'd be curious to know if there any CSS/HTML experiments going on with typesetting academic papers. LaTeX may be beautiful and powerful but it may also be too hard.
And it really doesn't handle very good HTML output -- aren't we supposed to be on the internet already?