Re: [dev] Usable typesetting system?

On Sun, Aug 22, 2010 at 01:15:40PM +0200, Martin Kopta wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> I wrote my bachelor thesis using LaTeX and now I am going to write my
> master thesis. I would rather avoid TeX and everything TeX based this time.
>
> The PDF output of (La)TeX is awesome and I really like that part of it, but
> writting itself was painful, since the language is pretty cryptic and complex
> for 'simple document like thesis'. Overhelming compilation output completely
> hides any warnings and errors, which are too fuzzy and useless anyway. Also,
> work with images is pretty much impossible and texlive package is too big in
> size.
>
> I am currently looking for some replacement with:
>
> * input as plain text (NOT xml)
> * simple syntax/commands/language
> * output as PDF (acceptable as thesis), may be indirectly
> * usable compilator (readable overall output, warnings and errors)
> * overall good design
>
> I guess my demands are too high, but if you know about something interesting,
> please, let me know.
>
> Thank you,
> dum8d0g

This is probably not what you're looking for, but last year I've
been using lout[1] (that website is awful, btw) for all of my
university documents. It's not really suckless, but I think that
overall it's better than LaTeX. The syntax feels rather lisp-y
(it's actually a functional language), but is much easier to extend
and program than TeX. It's written entirely in C and the lout
distribution is *much* smaller than (La)TeX.

$ du -sh lout.lib/
5.5M lout.lib/

lout outputs directly to postscript, so compiling to pdf is rather
easy.

$ lout test.lout | ps2pdf - test.pdf

Links:
[1] http://lout.wiki.sourceforge.net/
Received on Sun Aug 22 2010 - 17:58:04 CEST