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Comment by jessriedel | Hacker News Reader

I'll keep saying it: The most cost-effective way to advance math and hard science research in the United States would be for some person or organization to put down $1 million to hire some developers to produce an enterprise-quality replacement of LaTeX, with an editor. It ought to be somewhere between LaTeX and Markdown in complexity. The amount of grad student, post-doc, and professor time that is wasted dealing with LaTeX is staggering. There's just no reason any should need to spend, e.g., an hour to figure out how to get columns working.

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SILE looks promising: http://www.sile-typesetter.org/

Sphinx and restructured text are getting pretty close.

http://www.sphinx-doc.org/

Shouldn't be hard to create a GUI around it. Looks like audreyr started one, just needs some help. https://github.com/audreyr/sphinx-gui

I would say Sphinx has the exact problem grandparent describes. I've spent a lot of time and frustration trying to figure out what syntax it wants to link to another doc, for example.

Yes, it was harder than it probably should be but now that I've written a book in it I've got it down by heart. Probably needs to be more prominent in the docs:

    # doc1, the destination
    
    .. _introduction:

    Introduction
    ---------------

    asdf asdf…

Then in the source document:

    # doc2, the source

    In the :ref:`Intro <introduction>` or 
    simply :ref:`introduction`,
    blah blah blah.

I made snippets in my editor to help with common tasks such as this.

I completely agree with this sentiment. LaTeX is far too complex for what needs to be highly accessible and Markdown, while super easy, is too limited for showing things like complex data sets (or really even simple ones to be honest).

The biggest problem with the idea of getting people to make a new format is essentially this: https://xkcd.com/927/

What's to say the ultimate result will be something most think is usable? Design by commit is rarely the answer as well.

Have you really read that article? Their main focus is on how to enforce customizable writing styles/rules/constraints. They want a lightweight markup language like XML+DTD.

I did read it, and I'm suggesting that a lightweight markup language is needed to replace LaTeX as it is used in academia, i.e., the language that people actually write in. (If that language gets compiled into TeX or some other lower-level typesetting language, all the better.) So I don't understand your objection.

I mean you make the subject too broad. You can see this file in their repo:

https://github.com/mbakeranalecta/sam/blob/7f9eece97b30a2a5f...

It is like YAML+Markdown+(Custom Schema for Semantics). They are also considering embedding LaTeX document, not replacing LaTeX. "Lightweight" as they said.

Couldn't agree with you more! Unfortunately there's no "golden accolades" in such a endeavor and even more difficulty getting it to be a community standard. Academics (especially professors) tend towards using it only if their advisor used it or another prestigious lab does. Actually having a NSF/NIH (TM) sponsored projects could help with that.

In the meantime, checkout Madoko: https://www.madoko.net -- some research folks at Microsoft basically made an extensible markdown format that compiles nicely to Latex or Word (-ish).

When I was a grad student, those of us in the lab had this conversation on a weekly basis.

Now I wonder...

NSF has these big cyberinfrastructure programs. I wonder what they'd say if you proposed such a thing.

http://www.nsf.gov/div/index.jsp?div=ACI

To have even a slight chance at success in this, you'd definitely need to have your story straight from the very beginning. You'd need to show a very low-risk plan for replicating all the features of LaTeX that really matter, with measurable improvement in usability.

Probably a super-long shot, but it would be very cool.

I don't think that rewriting LaTeX is the right route, but rather compiling something else into LaTeX or making a good LaTeX editor(one where you wouldn't actually be writing straight LaTeX). I think a sort of SASS or Coffeescript type language for Latex would be excellent.

lyx? personally, I think it takes less time to learn latex

A language that compiles into TeX would be fine. However, there is a huge danger that the abstraction isn't robust, and everyone would just need to keep "opening up the hood" to fix things in the original TeX, and then things are worse than they started.

Totally agree.

What do you think of Pandoc?

http://pandoc.org/

And the output format should be

    1. executable
    2. machine readable

So that it is searchable/discoverable in digital libraries.

You just described AsciiDoc.

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