Is a successor for TeX/LaTeX in sight? [closed]

Answer 1

TeX is actually a fairly special purpose typsetting system. It does what it does well, but there isn't a large enough need for something better. "When he designed TeX, Donald Knuth did not believe that a single typesetting system would fit everyone's needs" (wikipedia)

Most of the "newer" systems build guis and extend TeX, which I believe is the right approach.

There are very good reasons for the 'issues' you are facing, so if you want to propose that it be done differently please research those reasons first.

Second, you yourself indicate that TeX is great except for a few minor quibbles. Knuth built it expressly knowing that it wouldn't be suitable for all uses and all people, but he released the source code and built an extension API so that anyone could adapt it for their needs.

You have all the tools you need to make the changes you propose, and it will be far easier to update TeX than to start from scratch, or even adapt any other system. Truly, nothing comes close to TeX. That's not to say that it's the best, but merely to drive home the point that it would be a monumental effort to implement all the good things you mention and somehow overcome the bad (although by the time you get to the bad you may better understand why it exists).

Regardless, I hope you pursue this, even as an advocate, and get others interested in it. It would be great to see take up of TeX in other fields, but that does require modification and update for ease of use and a better support of other technical entities than mathematical equations.

-Adam

Answer 2

That doesn't really cut into the main disadvantages of LaTeX, but no matter :) Regarding your point

• "sometimes you have to type too much (begin{itemize} ... \end{itemize})"

this is entirely by design. There is a tradeoff between terse (and easier to type) and understandable (and longer to type). Longer names also have fewer collisions, since TeX and LaTeX don't support namespaces (unfortunately).

Anyway, a good editor will obviate the complaint above. Set up key-bindings or tab-completions or whatever else takes your fancy and you never have to write

\begin{whatever}...\end{whatever}

ever again.

Answer 3

The short answer is 'No' as LaTeX is the incumbent and quite good at its job. It's also free, so there is relatively little commercial incentive to attempt to replace it. In fact, TeX is sufficiently good at technical publishing that the commercial market for technical publishing tools is rather squeezed between TeX at the 'geek' end and word at the 'great unwashed' end.

The longer answer is 'There are alternatives'. LaTeX and other packages suffer heavily from leaky abstraction issues and often require technical intervention to get what you want out of it. This puts you in the business of understanding how it works behind the scenes, which is actually fairly technical. Thus, you can only really use it for non-casual applications if you have access to someone with that level of technical skill. Writing a report or book is fine. Building a single-source technical documentation workflow with LaTeX is quite a different proposition - you will need access to someone with a technical skill base.

Alternatives to LaTeX

• Commercial technical publication tools. There is really only one left standing: Framemaker. This is a mature product but somewhat stagnant. However, it does have an open document and segment interchange format called MIF, a comprehensive API and extensive support for structured documentation. It's quite widely used in aerospace circles (for example) where reference documents for aircraft run to tens of thousands of pages. Additionally, there are several also-rans in this space: Ventura Publisher, Arbortext (which is based on a TeX derived back-end IIRC), and Interleaf, which is now known as Quicksilver.
  Adobe claim to be implementing technical publishing functionality in InDesign but I have not really evaluated its capabilities for this.

• Lout A markup language with a completely different underlying architecture to TeX. I've never worked with Lout but I believe that it is somewhat easier to work on behind the scenes than TeX.

• Troff/Groff. Originally designed for technical documentation within AT&T during the 1970s (actually a spinoff of the UNIX R&D work), it's still quite widely used for this today. For quite a long time most if not all O'Reilly books were typeset using it.

• DocBook. This is an XML tag based format for structure documentation, and tends to work by rendering through foreign engines. I've never used DocBook, so I can't really comment on its usage in practice.

• Wordperfect. This is a venerable word processing system that is considerably better at documentation-in-the-large than MS-Word. Although viewed as something of an also-ran it retains several niche markets such as law offices and is reasonably good (at least significantly better than Word) for large, complex and heavily cross-referenced documents.

• Microsoft Word. Not recommended for serious technical publication tasks due to its instability on complex documents. However, as often as not it is the only choice due to political constraints. Indexing is especially painful.

EDIT: See this Stackoverflow post for a more in-depth rundown on Framemaker and other technical documentation tools. It's an answer to a question about technical documentation tools for someone who specifically didn't want to use a markup language based system.

Answer 4

TeX is not a general purpose typesetting system: its core proficiency is in typesetting long texts with lots of math. In that it doesn't have any competition, I can imagine several reasons:

• Donald Knuth was smart. He did amazing job with, for example, spacing in formulas.
• Math notation changes across periods of time like centuries. There's a limited set of features that is necessary and thus no market for new typesetting systems.
• Network effects. The only purpose of paper is to be read. Most papers advance on some others' research and are using their notation. With TeX you're sure you get the same fonts and the same spacing, and you have a technical ability to copy complex formulas from their papers.
• In TeX it's trivial to define new macro, it's usually easy to say what a simple macros does from its definition and there many standard macro libraries. Any GUI-based system would likely make this process much less transparent.

While the drawbacks you quoted are real, it's much easier to look around for a decent editor/GUI shell built on top of TeX, of which are many, than to typeset in a different language. If you're into math, and want your articles to be preserved for decades, that is. For the general purpose typesetting, again, the programs you mentioned could well be a better choice.

Answer 5

I just stumbled upon AsciiDoc which looks like a simple text markup language (á la markdown, textile), but it's a lot more powerful. It's roughly equivalent with DocBook, so it can emit html, pdf, or even docbook xml for further processing.

Answer 6

You cannot retain "it has many extensions to reach different goals" with something new. By definition something new that is not TeX/LaTeX will start with no extension.

Having been a core contributor to the GNU TeXmacs project, which aims to be something like "TeX except for the 21st century", I think have some good insight on the succession of LaTeX.

I am not aware of anything on the horizon that is any likely of dethroning LaTeX. The people of influence in the mathematical community are just too used to using LaTeX to seriously consider the effort required to learn any tool that could be equally flexible.

Maybe in 20 years, when all the folks that got their PhD when LaTeX was cool are retired will something else replace it. Hopefully, it will be something like TeXmacs, but without the unnecessary complexity.