Ask HN: What do you think about a simpler syntax that compiles into LaTeX? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What do you think about a simpler syntax that compiles into LaTeX?

2 pointschetan514 comments

I'm thinking of starting a project that is aimed at creating a simpler syntax for LaTeX, for cleaner and speedier document creation.

Check out the project notes, ideas, and examples at http://github.com/chetan51/eX.

There already exists a syntax called Multimarkdown, but it doesn't support a lot of basic stuff (AFAIK) like multi-line equations, theorems, etc. Basically, it's not as simple or specifically tailored for LaTeX as I would hope.

My vision is to make simple LaTeX document creation easier and faster using this shorthand notation, and to make LaTeX more accessible to the non-technical masses.

What do you think? Is this a project worth spending time and effort on? Would you use it?

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My initial take on it (and take it with a grain of salt, I am not a LaTeX power user, I just wrote my thesis in it and a few documents and haven't spent much time thinking about shorthand but,) is that there are basically two types of users who write LaTeX: people who author complicated documents and typeset equations and need LaTeX as their bread and butter of publishing and casual users who just want to write an essay or two.

Sounds like you're targeting much more of the latter group to increase accessibility. However, for that group of people a few LaTeX IDEs already exist that make it even easier than typesetting with a simpler mark up.

A lot of very smart people have spent a lot of time thinking about (La)TeX formatting, syntax and interaction and I doubt giving it a simplistic interface will do it much justice or introduce it to someone who found the original markup inaccessible.

Just my $0.02.

To what extent do the non-technical masses spend a lot of time writing formulas? That seems to be a big gating factor on the audience for this.

Is there an unmet need (other than formulas) that is solved by writing documents in latex? obviously, a lot of the tags in HTML 1.x/2.x are derivedish from LaTeX so this has worked out well for at least one person previously. On the other hand, as Yan points out, DEK and company are smart people who have given this a lot of thought.

I would love it if it had support for source code listings too.

"\usepackage{listings}" should do the trick for you. http://www.usq.edu.au/users/leis/notes/latex/code.html

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