LaTeX, markdown, ooxml

HTML/CSS/SVG are superior in every way for document preparation. Very fucking portable (even music players can view HTML now), easy to use, doesn't "fail to compile," more easily extensible with CSS than TeX ever can be, able to make documents scriptable with an innovative functional language (JS)...Seriously, TeX is dead. Stop using it please.

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA512

0/10 are you even trying

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.12 (GNU/Linux)

iF4EAREKAAYFAlDmUiYACgkQGRQwWY30ng1/ngD+Nvnn4Nv1Kmh1N+gDi9AJy+zk
2DU+XP21Rz/xLidrgEEA/j8Tb7rFc+x1MlEXMImqgaVOCc77EDux3a6yXgm0NN/O
=1YHu
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

Oh and of course it is significantly smaller than PDF or DVI or any of the common delivery formats for LaTeX. That means much faster download times.

IHNBT

which idiot decided PDF to be the ``le universal document format''?

>>5
Adobe?

>>5
Portable Document Format is a file format used to represent documents in a manner independent of application software, hardware, and operating systems. Each PDF file encapsulates a complete description of a fixed-layout flat document, including the text, fonts, graphics, and other information needed to display it. It is an ISO format.

>>5
It's the universal static fixed-layout document format.

>>1
>HTML
Context sensitive grammar? not thanks you

I'll keep sharing document encoded with a regular grammar, thanks

>>9
Latex is probably turing complete.

troff master race reporting in for duty.

>>10
It is.

>>10
TeX is Turing complete. It's also a complete pain to program in. Attempt to write a macro to do anything useful that should be fairly simple: you'll wish you hadn't, because you won't get your time back.

If you're really up for a challenge, try making it write out your source file with all tokens expanded to primitives. You'll then learn how irritatingly context sensitive TeX (and LaTeX) can be.

LaTeX also doesn't really separate math notation from math meaning, which math web standards like MathML, OpenMath do. The ability to independently include other standards for semantic web, scripting, web support, style transformations, etc, also makes web documents highly flexible. A preprocessor in a better language that (truly) separated meaning and style and output to such formats could really be something.

It's also a complete pain to program in.
Because it's not designed for general purpose programming.

>>12
So technically it's not context sensitive grammar

Why is T_EX syntax such a piece of shit? Don't get me wrong, I love the results, but the means to those results are fucking awful.

>>14
True, but just simplifying a bit of tedious writing/code in some straightforward way or changing a default can be daunting. The macro language goes through several layers of processing that interact and create unexpected results unless you understand the processing model perfectly. It makes specifying a style for some things a bit harder than it needs to be if a package writer hadn't figured it out for you. It could be better.