Re: [tlug] Poll: OpenOffice or LibreOffice?

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

On 2014年05月19日 19:46, Simon Cozens wrote:
> On 19/05/2014 01:54, Bruno Raoult wrote:
>> Again, LaTeX is probably very good. But for elite. Then going to disappear.
> 
> To be replaced by what, exactly? (Well, I am working on one possible 
> replacement. ;-) )

*Many* people dream of replacing (La)TeX! ;)

I use LaTeX for the quality of output.  I know of no other open source
software that comes anywhere close.  General-purpose word processors
(Word, LibreOffice, etc.) are clearly inferior.  Proprietary DTP software
(notably InDesign) can produce pretty high quality output, but I *much*
prefer plain text source over WYSIWYG editing for many reasons.

The thing that I dislike most about LaTeX is that it is not very
accessible.  With non-trivial documents (those with many custom
environments and commands), it can be quite difficult for people to
contribute or modify the source, perhaps defeating much of the point of
releasing the source.  It is analogous to releasing complex software
written in assembly language.

I think that TeX (a Turing-complete, macro-based programming language) is
what makes LaTeX most inaccessible.  TeX macros can be extremely difficult
to read and debug, especially for people who are used to modern
programming languages.  I would be very interested in a replacement that
produces comparable output yet uses a more modern language.

Cheers,

Travis