Hacker News Reader

Agreed, but for my case, I didn't really care too much about the PDF output. The printed version of my thesis is going to sit in my university library untouched forever. I'm much more concerned with having a semantically correct, searchable, beautiful HTML output.

View on HN

Why not to go the other way round in this case? Typeset your thesis in semantically correct, searchable, beautiful HTML5, and then just add some specific CSS to get the hard print copy?

One big reason is math, which TeX is very good at.

Mathjax is very good at it too.

I don't argue that TeX is good for typesetting thesis. I doubt that sphinx, even with some plug-ins is good for that. Also don't forget that reStructuredText has its own problems (not found in HTML and LaTeX). Can I have some bold italic or italic monospaced phrase example in reStructuredText please? No, really?

Unfortunately, browsers are not up to the job so far. For example, page-break-inside:avoid is only supported by Opera[0]. Maybe Prince [1], which is not for free, though.

[0] http://www.w3schools.com/cssref/pr_print_pagebi.asp [1] http://www.princexml.com/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com