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Comment by FraaJad | Hacker News Reader

As a typesetting aficionado, I have tried most of the suggestions here (Prince, Troff, Lout, Docbook XML, Asciidoc, LaTeX, ConTeXt, .. except GUI typesetting tools.)

TeX appears bad from a distance, mostly from hearsay, until you have to write an actual technical book of certain expected high production standards and you realize TeX gives you the best shot at doing so.

There is a learning curve. It is an investment of your time, but it pays off.

Also, it is not like LaTeX et al are standing still in time. There are companies and teams working on improving the ecosystem everyday. I personally like ConTeXt unless I'm doing a predefined template exists (for conferences etc.,) where it makes sense to just use their LaTeX guidelines.

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Of recent attempts at dethroning LaTeX, there's also SILE, which actually reuses some LaTeX internals. For some examples of the output (hard to find, the author seems not great at marketing), see e.g.:

https://github.com/simoncozens/sile/blob/master/examples/ara...

https://github.com/simoncozens/sile/blob/master/examples/art...

https://github.com/simoncozens/sile/blob/master/examples/fra...

https://github.com/simoncozens/sile/blob/master/examples/par...

https://github.com/simoncozens/sile/blob/master/examples/jap...

https://github.com/simoncozens/sile/blob/master/examples/tes...

For a deeper dive, see the author's presentation at FOSDEM 2015 - I found it really amusing - from the starting line of: "I wrote a typesetting system - by mistake."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5BIP_N9qQm4

I skimmed through their manual.. ConTeXt does all of this better, and has been doing this for longer.

In the video linked above, he mentions several things that ConTeXt can't do, or can't do as easily. On the other hand, the SILE ecosystem isn't as complete as TeX's yet.

It doesn't do math though.

yep, that's a significant and notable TODO. Though I have an idea that maybe trying automatic translation of MathJax from JS to Lua using one of the available tools could have a chance of being a win as a relatively quick hack. But I couldn't find time yet to compile SILE itself first, as I don't have a Linux box handy, unfortunately :(

Care to comment on the reasons for using ConTeXt versus LaTeX? I've been curious about ConTeXt for a while, but I fall back on LaTeX out of familiarity (and the need to use provided document classes.)

LaTeX's selling point is, it allows someone(publisher, conference committee, school, professor) to set what is acceptable typesetting and rest of us can focus on the content.

ConTeXt is excellent if you care about design -- visual, layout, use of non-traditional typeface families, non-traditional print medium, create magazines, glossies, etc.,.

Writing a new style, class etc., for LaTeX feels like it's for "experts only". On the other hand, extending and creating new styles etc., for ConTeXt is much more natural part of creating the document.

ConTeXt is also highly programmable and extensible using Lua, XML(think machine generated catalogue).

With Metapost (graphics language), you can create highly sophistical vector diagrams. I have found pgf/tikz to be highly opinionated and it take much more upfront learning compared to metapost.

ConTeXt is also more intuitive, IMHO.

I like LaTeX for formatting small works. But would a publisher be willing to take LaTeX input when producing a book?

They've been a pain in the ass about it IME, but you can convert it to markdown for editing, then PDF for pre-print.

many scientific and tech publishing houses have their own LaTeX styles (eg: MIT, nostarch).

Sadly I have to work in Windows at times. Context seems to not be the most supported Windows platform. (The link to the Windows simplified package is 404) There is a New Installer http://wiki.contextgarden.net/Windows_Installation_new which does not contain a working binary. The only way to find anything for windows leads to a tar file.

I still think there is a better way to do typesetting in 2016 but all I have seen are a bunch of smaller projects without much support.

Personally I would love a markup language redefined with built in PDF-X support and a simple infrastructure. Context is Ruby, Tex, and ConText. I find LaTex to work well (for the most part) but it is not very flexible but I found the MikText Package Manager as a big step forward.

I wonder if it works under the new Linux subsystem.

For LaTeX on Windows I enjoy http://miktex.org/.

Well ConTex is in addition to MikTex

I thought ConText was using Lua for scripting things.

This suggests that:

http://wiki.contextgarden.net/Mark_IV

you use ConTeXt over the LuaTeX engine.

So it still requires Ruby and you can do Lua code.

Ruby is used for tooling and is not at the heart of the typesetting programs themselves.

I wish I could answer this.. but I'm a Mac and Linux user.

with the new "Bash for windows", it will hopefully get easier in future.

Well the BIG issue is you can't create new files on Window files only save as. I use virtual machines but my Window computers at work are long in the tooth machines.

Both the TeX Live and MiKTeX distributions provide binaries for Context on Windows.

> Also, it is not like LaTeX et al are standing still in time.

Indeed -- XeTeX (and XeLaTeX) support Unicode and OpenType fonts natively (including system installed fonts). It's a pleasure to use.

I liked TeX for typesetting my thesis, but I feel like, looking back, it would be nearly impossible to convert my document to a reflowable format. Not sure what can be done about that if you want nice typesetting in a fixed size environment, though. I'm curious to what extent the dual-format problem has been addressed.

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