Re: [dev] Usable typesetting system?

On Sun, Aug 22, 2010 at 03:29:35PM +0200, Alexander Teinum wrote:
> I want to use Markdown for writing university documents, but it lacks
> features such as table of contents, list of figures, and reference lists.
>
> HTML is not something I would choose for output format, since it doesn?t
> know the height of a page.
>
> Personally, I?d love to see a Markdown-language with some ?university
> extensions?. It should have a fast compiler written in C or Go. It should
> output a PDF, follow the APA Style ? well, that?s what we?re supposed to
> follow at my university in Norway.
>
> All of this can be modularized. Perhaps Markdown with macro support would
> solve the problem. Maybe it already exists?
>
> I?m learning troff right now so that I can write man-pages. It seems like a
> nice enough language. I have used LaTeX for university work earlier, and the
> result was really nice.
>
> I do find LaTeX and troff hard to get into. I am not able to fully express
> what I feel about this, but it has something to do with the documentation.
> It?s more inaccessible compared to Markdown and HTML. LaTeX in itself isn?t
> that hard, but the whole ecosystem around it feels scary.

latex/tex may be hard to get into initially, but it offers pretty good
support for references, and support for mathematical equations etc. I
would hardly think one would want to use markdown (or a markdown like
system) to typeset mathematical equations which is it's strong point.

-- 
Jimmy Tang
Trinity Centre for High Performance Computing,
Lloyd Building, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin 2, Ireland.
http://www.tchpc.tcd.ie/