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

Answer 1

TeX and LaTeX set the bar high; it's hard to imagine something entirely new coming along and replacing them.

I've got a copy of Knuth's Computer Modern Typefaces (Book E in the Computers And Typesetting series, which I think is completed unlike TAOCP). I don't think many people get to see this book, and - indulge me - it really is worth looking at. You can see where some of Kunth's time went. Here's a quote from the preface:

Another piece of luck came my way in 1984, when I learned that the original bronze patterns used to make the molds of Monotype 8A were in San Francisco. For years I had been working with indirect and imprecise information about the fonts that had stimulated this work. First I had worked from photographic blowups of letterpress original pages from The Art of Computer Programming; then Richard Southall had prepared enlargements from original proofs he had located in England. At last I found the actual 80-year-old patterns that had generated the metal type. The present owner of these patters, Mr. Othmar Peters, kindly consented to let me borrow them while I was preparing the final draft of Computer Modern, and I learned much by measuring them with calipers.

You just don't get that kind of attention to detail in many places, and that's why TeX endures.

Answer 2

You might also be interested in XeTeX, which is a modern version of LaTeX in that it supports Unicode and many fonts. You can use it to directly input Japanese, Arabic etc. in one document. (This doesn't address the disadvantages that you gave, but it's still relevant to the discussion about LaTeX' shortcomings and alternative systems! )

Answer 3

You may want to check out Wikipedia's categories Typesetting programming languages and Free typesetting software. Lout in particular sounds nice.

Answer 4

Perhaps you have noticed the weird version numbers of TeX. When TeX reached version 3 Knuth didn't want TeX to evolve further into new versions like most software does. Instead he wanted it to converge to a final and bug-free TeX. Hence the version number now converges towards the mathematical number pi. After version 3 followed version 3.1, then 3.14 and the current version is 3.1415926.

In a similar fashion Metafont has a version that converges towards the mathematical number e (currently 2.718281).

Based on this, the answer to your question is that Knuth doesn't want TeX to evolve into TeX version 4.

Answer 5

www.patoline.org is a great alternative to TeX/LaTeX systems. It has already been packaged for Arch Linux, NixOS, and can be compiled from source on many Unix-like systems.

Answer 6

Apart from the issue of graphics being hard to position, your other criticisms of LaTeX are more to do with its UI or lack thereof.

If you want to use LaTeX to produce your documents but want an easier way to use it then you should really check out LyX. It's a GUI front-end to LaTeX and address several of your issues: it makes LaTeX easier to learn (in fact, you don't have to even know LaTeX to create a simple, mathless document), it's more intuitive, and it saves you typing. It also adds spell-checking, better graphics handling, navigation, and more.

Because LyX is merely a front-end to LaTeX you still get beautifully presented documents. LyX documents are also plain text so version control works well. In fact, LyX has support for subversion built-in.

If you haven't already guessed, I heartily recommend LyX. I wrote my entire PhD thesis using it and found it very worthwhile.