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Give me something that

  * is a simple and logically consistent as Markdown

  * has the ability to embed LaTeX formulas

  * has a functional #include for larger documents

  * can refer back to headings, equations and citations

  * can compile to PDF or webpage

  * compiles FAST

and I will give you a lot of money.

LaTeX is a horrible language, inconsistent and badly designed and unpleasant to look at. TeX is good at what it does but the whole system is horribly slow to compile documents. Documents will compile fine with some frontends but not with others. Markdown is not feature complete enough.

The scientific community is unfortunately stuck with LaTeX for the foreseeable future. Seems like every day someone asks me how to do something that should be very simple, which inevitably involves loading some obscure package.

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What do you find complicated/logically-inconsistent about LaTeX? The job it is supposed to do is nontrivial, so it seems appropriate that the tool is at least somewhat nontrivial, too, especially if you don’t like defaults.

It admittedly doesn’t compile to HTML and the compile-time can be on the order of minutes for very large documents, but are these really deal-breakers?

If you really don’t like LaTeX, have a look at org-mode, which seems to be able to fulfil most, if not all, of your requirements (not sure about compile times).

Org is really good about letting you unobtrusively embed LaTex into a document and can export to a bunch of formats.

I was doing an algorithms course with lots of mathematical formulas last year. Org was a godsend for completing the homework assignments.

Pandoc has almost all these features: http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/

I think it's lacking the #include/#input feature, and I'm not sure whether it supports labels and internal references, but apparently it has some form of bibliography.

Pandoc doesn't have an "include" feature, but it's easy enough to add this with a preprocessor. See http://randomdeterminism.wordpress.com/2012/06/01/how-i-stop....

Pandoc does provide a way to link to section headings, but it doesn't yet have a generic system for autogenerating numbers and producing references to these, like LaTeX's \label{} and \ref{}. It does, however, have a system for creating running example lists: http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/README.html#numbered-exampl.... This can be used for numbering equations and referring back to them, but it is considerably less flexible than LaTeX.

Pandoc has extensive support for automatic citations using CSL stylesheets: http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/README.html#citations. BibTeX and BibLaTeX files can be used as the database, or YAML citations can be included in the markdown document itself.

LaTeX formulas can be embedded in markdown. They can even use macros defined in the document. Formulas can be converted to MathML or native Word equation objects, depending on the output format.

Pandoc can also be extended using "filters" that operate directly on the parsed AST. Here's an example of a filter that finds tikz diagrams and converts them to embedded images that can be displayed on the web: https://github.com/jgm/pandocfilters/blob/master/examples/ti....

hi fiddlosopher, we love Pandoc! We use it extensively and find it to work very very well with most TeX content. The only problematic part is tables (e.g. captions do not render in the latest pandoc version).

reStructuredText (http://docutils.sourceforge.net/rst.html) seems have all those qualities. It's simple and IMHO more consistent than Markdown, math and include directives, cross-references and can be compiled to almost anything with tools like Pandoc (http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/).

Pandoc does a lot of that (but I haven't used it).

At a minimum, it does markdown with embedded LaTeX and outputs pdf.

I made my own markup language (post: http://breuleux.net/blog/quaint.html, docs: http://breuleux.net/quaint/, source: https://github.com/breuleux/quaint) and I think it could eventually fit the bill. I designed the syntax to be extremely regular, easy to extend and to stay out of your way. You can embed Python code to extend it (I don't get why you'd make a formatting language Turing complete instead of just embedding a real one). It generates documents in multiple passes and lets you specify what parts depend on what other parts, so back references are easy to implement. Unfortunately, I'm the sole developer and I've only developed it enough to be useful to my own purposes, so it only compiles to HTML and lacks a lot of features.

I'm not sure why you want the ability to embed LaTeX formulas. LaTeX formats math gloriously, but its syntax is not any less horrid for math than it is for anything else. I'd rather write "sum(i <- 1..10, frac(t_i, sigma^2))" than "\sum_{i=1}^{10} \frac{t_i}{\sigma^2}" but maybe that's just me.

Asciidoctor: http://asciidoctor.org/docs/asciidoc-writers-guide/ . There are forthcoming plans to include a LaTeX backend (https://github.com/asciidoctor/asciidoctor/issues/681 ), but it can already output to HTML and Docbook, which can in turn output to other formats including PDF. There's also MathJax-based equation support for the HTML5 backend: https://github.com/asciidoctor/asciidoctor/issues/492 .

Obviously the big step is for it to be able to output LaTeX so that the equation capabilities and such will be directly exposed, but Asciidoc is pretty awesome already in my experience.

> horrible language, inconsistent and badly designed and unpleasant to look at.

I can see how you might not like the language itself, I don't either. But inconsistency is rather orthogonal quality. I think it is actually pretty consistent, which is respectable in its own right.

I believe that the Softcover typesetting system I'm working on meets all of the criteria you set out. It's currently in private beta; you can sign up for an invitation here:

http://softcover.io/

Send an email to the address in my profile and I'll fast-track it.

orgmode

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