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Comment by gumby | Hacker News Reader

Seems like a step backwards. One of the great things about Latex (or raw tex) is that you can simply type it into a buffer. No need to mouse around to select text or anything like that. Hard to find anything really more usable than that.

Back in 1984 I wrote a small WYSIWYG editor at PARC that outputted primitive LaTex. Fortunately LaTeX was quite early stage and that little project went nowhere. But one of the lessons was that semantic markup was much easier to do by just typing rather than trying to infer it context, while -driven changes meant people usually just changed font and size and erased the semantic anyway. This has been borne out by Word.

Edit: added bit starting “But one of...” to explain my comment

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.title My concerns with the point made by Hacker News user gumby

If you were to write something like HTML, how would you do so in a manner that didn't involve raw text? Sure it might be [emph shown] in a marked up way, but then doesn't your LaTeX editor do this?

And if your editor does this, how can you be sure that the new markup language for documents are not, in fact, superior in readability and expressiveness to LaTeX?

I mean, the made up formatting I tried to show in this comment is more readable and extendable than LaTeX (in my eyes, anyway), but it is still raw text.

The article was Word vs a markup language like latex. I find the latter simpler to use.

Html wasn’t mentioned in the article but it is ok. I find latex easier and the result more attractive.

My editor doesn’t do any highlighting or anything like that. It does have syntax-dependent motion commands, which work better with LT than html.

> One of the great things about Latex (or raw tex) is that you can simply type it into a buffer. No need to mouse around to select text or anything like that. Hard to find anything really more usable than that.

More usable for you perhaps, but certainly not for me.

I think the grandparent is talking about a better WYGIWYG language, like HTML generally is. You can (and most people, at least on HN, probably do) edit HTML in a buffer.

Edit: changed parent → grandparent

What do you mean? Writing a document in html is not much different than doing it in LaTeX.

Yes, that's exactly what I mean, I was replying to

> One of the great things about Latex (or raw tex) is that you can simply type it into a buffer.

and pointing out it also applies to HTML.

I clarified my comment.

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