

LaTeX3 versus LuaTeX: which is the future? Statements by LaTeX3 team members. - idle
http://tex.stackexchange.com/q/45183/213

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larsberg
I'm sort of skeptical that any of these will be usable as a complete
replacement for a very long time. Heck, I can't even use pdflatex today
because the toolchains for several conferences and journals (I'm looking at
you, Journal of Functional Programming!) require both the output to have been
emitted by the latex (chokes on the PDF otherwise) and for the document
sources that you provide them to also be compileable with it.

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apatry
I started using ConTeXt (<http://wiki.contextgarden.net/Main_Page>) after many
years of LaTeX. The command interfaces are more homogeneous than with LaTeX
and it is quite easy to do complex layout with it.

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zvrba
ConTeXt is an awesome package. Its "only" drawback is that it's unsupported by
publishers. I thought about writing my thesis in ConTeXt, but then I couldn't
have easily reused the text from published papers.

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zmanji
Tangentially related: How does one write 'modern' LaTeX today? What
packages/tools do people use to ensure their documents work properly?

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w1ntermute
Looking at the compile script for my CV, I'm currently using latex, bibtex,
and xelatex, along with sed to work around some nasty bibliography
implementation issues.

LaTeX really needs to be just revamped whole. I haven't been following the
development of LuaTeX or LaTeX3, but I hope that's what they both do. The
syntax needs to be simplified, concerns that no longer exist thanks to
improved hardware (such as super-optimized algorithms for hyphenation) need to
be discarded, and all of the popular 3rd party packages need to be integrated
into a single, cohesive piece of software.

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ssp
What are the problems with Liang's algorithm?

On a modern computer you could easily store the entire dictionary, but it's
not clear that that's actually an improvement since it wouldn't be as good at
dealing with unknown words.

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frankbrown
I guess both new LaTeX3 syntax and the Lua part will be hidden if I'm a casual
user. So I will indirectly benefit from both, while the package and class
authors will hopefully use the new capabilities.

And why not working with a LuaLaTeX3 - the best of both worlds can be used.

