Hacker News Reader

Comment by charlieyu1 | Hacker News Reader

And there are no file formats that support it, unless you go to something like Markdown.

You could also use docbook. My gut feeling is, that if you have large documents that you collaboratively work on, there's probably a bit of a compilation process to be done and other stuff you want to do with the document.

So the overhead of semantic markup of the whole content (instead of just marking words as bold) might be worth it.

LaTeX seems like it fits the bill.

I have used LaTeX for a lot of things and it is a pain to use. It is like everything is stuck in 70s, from the syntax to the toolchain to package management.

I don't use LaTeX for anything these days but Typst popped up recently and seems like a decent alternative: https://github.com/typst/typst

I dont like the idea of embedding a scripting language in my documents at all.

I mean LaTeX is Turing complete as well. It is just that scripting is very clunky to use.

Well, sure, I think thats part of the problem with it.

I dont think either of them have to be turing complete though.

Have a look at Typst then. It's a fresh take on the concept.

Otoh I feel like it forces me to keep it simple. I have two or three templates I've been using for decades, occasionally needing an update because some package was deprecated. Documents are not like Web Design where every two years someone comes up with completely new design guidelines based on the latest super duper awesome user testing and UX research and everything we did before was inferior.

To be fair, printed documents used to be like that for the first one or two centuries of their existence.

Another way of looking at it is that LaTeX is so good no one has managed to come up with something better.

I recently started using it because Lyx does not work on my ARM based Linux tablet and its not too bad when used with a GUI editor.

It is a lot more powerful than other things I use (Markdown, Sphinx) and a lot better for version tracking and multiple output formats than word processors.

Typically the big task of a large document is focused on content and organization, and the formatting is a separate concern.

XML is a good start to describing structured text.

Well, it depends.

If you're compiling a report for a college group project (or the workplace equivalent of that) you might well need things like equations and tables and suchlike.

For example if you've got a table of performance results with the best performer in each row highlighted in bold, a fact the text references - then separating content and formatting doesn't really make that much sense.

Just an example. Obviously the more formatting control you need the fancier your language and tool is. Tex is the upper bound.

> For example if you've got a table of performance results with the best performer in each row highlighted in bold, a fact the text references - then separating content and formatting doesn't really make that much sense.

You can tag the text as "important": see <strong> vs. <b> in HTML.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com