Re: [tlug] Poll: OpenOffice or LibreOffice?

[Travis Cardwell <travis.cardwell@example.com>]

On 2014年05月21日 14:33, Simon Cozens wrote:
> Replacing (La)TeX is easy. The problem is replacing CTAN/BibTeX/etc. People 
> aren't going to shift to a technically better solution until it does all the 
> things they can currently do and more. This is why I haven't made any 
> grandiose claims about my own code yet. :-)

It would indeed take significant time and effort to replace (La)Tex for
practical usage.

Code speaks for itself, however; major props for trying! :)

> My project[1] takes the following approach: it uses the TeX algorithms for 
> justification, hyphenation, boxes-and-glue etc. - so the output is definitely 
> comparable - but reimplemented in Lua[2]; it decouples the input language from
> the typesetter and allows multiple input languages; it provides two input 
> handlers, one which is XML-based (intended for input processed 
> programmatically from another source or generated by a GUI front-end) and one 
> which is a bit TeX-like for manual input.

Decoupling the input language is a great feature!

> The TeX-like language is 
> considerably simplified; commands copy what has become the de facto standard 
> for LaTeX:
> 
> 	\commandname[key=val,key=val,key=val]{content}
> 
> Or (equivalently)
> 
> 	\begin[key=val,key=val,key=val]{commandname}
> 	content
> 	\end{commandname}
> 
> You can define very simple text replacement macros, but by design you are 
> forced to define commands in a Lua extension for anything more complicated 
> than that.

I am a fan of separation of concerns, so forcing users to define
(complicated) commands separately sounds like a good feature to me!

> I'm just negotiating a grant to develop some more needed features, as some 
> people are interested in using it for a large project.

Congratulations on finding users, and good luck with the grant!

Cheers,

Travis