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Comment by ebg13 | Hacker News Reader

I think TeX is terrible, so keep it up please, but the examples all look really bad. If you want to sell someone on "this system will help you make beautiful documents", the examples need to wow.

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Not sure if TeX is “terrible” or not, but the syntax here looks very similar.

On a practical note, it may be worth exploring other options: groff and TeXMacs (no affiliation with TeX or emacs).

Lout[1] might also be worth a look.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lout_(software)

I have used ConTeXt for a bit. And it made me like TeX again. The typesetting is actually great. It does ligatures, kerning, right to left scripts, Arabic, and more. I think LaTeX is where it went wrong, with all the incompatible packages which redefine random stuff...

LaTeX can do all these things too. What Context brings to the table is a sane UI.

How is TeX terrible? I’d appreciate it if you could calibrate your response roughly to my level of discernment, which is to perceive LaTeX documents as better looking than Microsoft Word, but not be able to articulate why, or have much finer grained resolution than that.

Generally when you can’t discern the rational for a preference, it often means the underlying basis is associative rather than objective. That’s how most of us discern most things most of the time—a particular appearance tends to correlate with past performance.

You’ve probably read a bunch of very good papers typeset in TeX.

What I mean is that, with some things like music, I can say that this recording is better than this one because the musician is playing with better dynamics, or better pacing, etc, but with two chocolate cakes from a restaurant I can only say “this one is better.” I can’t give any advice to the chefs. Typesetting is like the latter, I can say “this looks better” but can’t say “it’s because the margins are wider” or the serifs are fatter.

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