
Lout: An alternative to LaTeX? - naner
http://www.charlietanksley.net/philtex/lout-an-alternative-to-latex/
======
wannesm
I love Latex but it (or more specifically TeX) is showing its age. It's
perfect for writing a paper given a good template but writing and debugging
these templates (.cls, .sty) is unnecessarily hard. For my job (in academia),
I have to update such Latex templates on a monthly basis and always end up
looking at the current improvements for Latex. This updating task involves not
'writing' in Latex but 'programming' in Latex. If you are used to modern
programming languages then Tex is stubborn and hard, therefore, I always have
the feeling there is improvement possible (I mean, Python, Javascript, C++,
... are all easier to debug). Although people are working hard on this and
doing interesting work (i.e., LuaLatex, Latex3), I feel the underlying Tex
language has had its time and a more drastic change might be necessary.
Remember that Tex is designed for computers with an order of magnitude less
resources.

An increasingly interesting Latex replacement is, maybe surprisingly, html in
combination with css and javascript. With every update of our browser the
inspection and debugging tools become more powerful and every time I can track
layout and programming bugs a little bit faster. With the addition of more
properties targeting paged media in css3 it now becomes possible to also
create nicely looking pdfs starting from html. Prince
(<http://www.princexml.com/>), for example, is ahead of the browsers for CSS
paged media properties and outputs a pdf-file directly. But also typical
features for which we praise Latex are becoming available:

\- Mathematical formulae: <http://www.mathjax.org/>

\- Bibliographies: <http://citationstyles.org/>

\- Advanced hyphenation: <http://code.google.com/p/hyphenator/>

Most people only use the basic commands and don't care about the underlying
engine. Therefore, Latex as a 'writing' language is not too attached to the
Tex 'programming' language. Pandoc (<http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/>) could
be enough to translate such Latex code to another markup format and use
another engine. (Academics tend to use advanced Latex macros only when in need
of space ;-))

~~~
adrianN
Due to its age, there is a massive codebase in TeX/LaTeX. There is literally a
package for everything. It would be a massive undertaking to replace the TeX
system by something that isn't downwards compatible. And since the vast
majority of LaTeX users don't get to see much of the underlying mess the
pressure to do so is rather small.

~~~
stdbrouw
Not necessarily. New people in academia learn LaTeX all the time, and if more
students start getting upset about having to learn it while there's an
alternative that, while lacking a zillion of packages, is easy to use and just
works right out of the box... then I don't see how professors would be able to
hold back the tide. I've seen engineers write papers in Microsoft Word, though
they're a minority. And then there's those English majors who just cajole a
buddy with InDesign into typesetting their thesis for them.

~~~
coliveira
Students have always been upset about learning Latex. However, after the first
or second paper they realize how much trouble Latex is saving them and become
fans for life. I don't see any other system offering the same advantages.

~~~
_delirium
Around here I've seen a considerable drop-off in TeX fans over the past 4-5
years, with more students opting for Word. It didn't used to be a viable
option, but now many conferences (outside a few very-math-heavy areas) offer
both LaTeX and Word stylesheets and let you choose, and Word has improved in a
few key areas, mainly citation support and auto-hyphenation. Zotero users also
seem to like the Word integration. Figure placement still sucks, but figure
placement isn't really TeX's strong suit either.

I personally still prefer TeX, but the gap is smaller than it was 10 years
ago. The auto-hyphenation is probably the single biggest change, since the
easy way to spot 2-column conference papers done in Word used to be the
horrible whitespace in justified columns caused by its inability to break
words. (This heuristic still words sometimes, because auto-hyphenation isn't
on by default, and not all authors know about it or use it.)

------
gchpaco
I played around with Lout for a good while during my brief fling with
alternative typesetters; this included tracking down some of the (quite scarce
at the time and still not easy to find) troff macro documentation.

It's cute and I liked that the language was generally sane but ultimately the
typesetting quality was noticeably inferior to TeX even for block text; for
setting mathematics Lout manages to make almost every single decision subtly
wrong. Lout text quality is about comparable to troff in this way. If I'd
never seen TeX it would look probably fine, or at least acceptable, but I
can't stand to look at it today.

------
JadeNB
Kingston has a successor language, called Nonpareil, which seems to have been
in development for quite some time:
<http://sydney.edu.au/engineering/it/~jeff/nonpareil>.

I love (La)TeX, but I'd also love to see viable alternatives in place.
However, I've never heard a success story (for example, "I wrote a book in it
and it was pleasant"—or even "… a paper … painless"!). In fact, this is the
first story I've heard of anyone (other than Kingston & co. himself) even
seriously _trying_ it.

Is there a Lout / Nonpareil showcase out there somewhere?

~~~
adaszko
Mark Summerfield is known to use lout for typesetting his books:

* <http://www.qtrac.eu/pyqtbook.html>

* <http://www.qtrac.eu/gobook.html>

------
zdw
In the world of "here's a preprocessor before LaTeX", pandoc tends to stand
out as you can do Markdown or similar with inline LaTeX or HTML:
<http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/>

~~~
dfc
_"tends to stand out"_?

Understatement of the year. The closest preprocessor to pandoc that I know of
is org-mode and the output is not nearly as nice and its emacs specific.

------
njoh
I think inventing typesetting languages that compile to TeX might partially
solve the problem and make the whole typesetting experience more pleasant,
since TeX is already a capable typesetting system, and has a rich ecosystem,
and TeX engines are already capable of producing high-quality documents, but
the hard part is writing TeX documents. So what haml is to HTML, or say
CoffeScript to javascript, a new language could be to TeX.

so inventing new, easier to use typesetting languages that use TeX as an
underlying system might be a good solution..

------
tangus
I keep revisiting Lout every couple of years, and they keep not supporting
UTF-8, which makes it unusable or me. It's a shame, because it looks really
nice.

------
rbehrends
I have been using Lout occasionally. It is a perfectly capable typesetting
systems, with both advantages and disadvantages over TeX/LaTeX/ConTeXt/etc.
The average user will probably want to stick with TeX and friends, but there
are situations where Lout is a good alternative.

The primary advantages are its very small size and its tight integration with
PostScript. The small size means that is very easily deployed (such as when
you need something to generate documents); the tight integration with
PostScript means that it is relatively easy (assuming you know a bit of
PostScript) to augment the output with graphics (I have even, for example,
sometimes used Lout to generate EPS diagrams to embed in LaTeX documents).
Much easier than using Metafun, for example.

The main disadvantages are that it cannot do everything that the TeX engine
does and that it has relatively few contributors.

For example, there's no way (other than manually inserting column breaks) to
automatically generate balanced columns. And while non-rectangular paragraphs
are possible in principle (such as for drop capitals or flowing text around
images), this generally requires sacrificing hyphenation (and can be non-
trivial for the non-expert user).

Lout also has fewer people contributing to/using it, so it does not have the
rich ecosystem of TeX and friends (e.g., while you can use it to generate
slides, there are more and more powerful LaTeX styles available). Integration
with bibliography tools and sites (that generally expect/produce BibTeX
format) can be another matter.

With respect to typesetting quality, it uses the same line-breaking algorithm
as standard TeX; it does not have the microtypography features of pdfTeX. For
typesetting anything mathematics (beyond basic math), TeX is generally
superior (which should not be surprising, given the effort Knuth put into
getting that right).

Also, while modifying/creating LaTeX packages these days is not exactly
child's play, Lout poses some challenges of its own; its functional
typesetting language (used both to describe the content and how that content
is laid out via so-called galleys) can be difficult to grasp for a novice.

------
stewbrew
Lout is around since the early 1990s. The fact that it didn't take off
probably indicates that it's no viable alternative.

Do they really still require users to explicitly mark paragraphs?

------
nullflux
Semi-unrelated: Does anyone recommend a good LaTeX tutorial/book?

~~~
Lewisham
The Not So Short Guide To LaTeX has always been a godsend to me, and it's
free.

------
tuananh
I personally believe ConTeXt has more potential over this.

------
nyar
"its chief advan­tages seem to be speed and size: a down­load of the entire
sys­tem is less than 1 MB, and takes around 5 MB when installed"

I have a 500GB hard drive.

~~~
Luyt
...and I have a 64GB SSD drive. Everything counts, in large amounts ;-)

------
duaneb
The equation builder looks downright painful to use.

~~~
zem
yeah, i find lout pretty pleasant for non-scientific stuff, but when it comes
to a bunch of equations and references you can't beat latex.

one thing the blog post didn't mention is that it is really easy to machine-
generate lout (indeed, that was one of its design goals), so it provides a
good option to quickly add ps and pdf output to a project.

------
rflrob
Even if there aren't pre-made bibliography styles, is there a bibliography
system at all, comparable to something like BibTeX?

------
mad44
These days I do most of my LaTeXing as an export from org-mode in emacs. Org-
mode allows me to use convenient markup notation, and uses sensible defaults
when exporting to LaTeX.

It keeps me happy, especially when exporting slides to Beamer, LaTeX based
presentation tool.

~~~
beza1e1
Off-topic: Generating slides from an outliner like Org-mode produces those
ugly bullet points en mass, doesn't it? The upside is of course, that they are
easy and fast to generate. Why do you need that?

~~~
dfc
Why do you need what?

Also check out org-beamer if you want to stick with org-mode. If you want an
alternative try pandoc. It supports 4 or 5 web presentation formats and
beamer.

------
vilya
I wonder if Sphinx[1] or something like it could be a good replacement for
LaTeX? It would need a better typesetting engine for PDFs, but the authoring
experience with it is pretty nice.

[1] <http://sphinx.pocoo.org/>

~~~
dfc
Sphinx is cool for what it is but it is not even a zygote of a potential latex
replacement...

------
indubitably
I'd be curious to know if there any CSS/HTML experiments going on with
typesetting academic papers. LaTeX may be beautiful and powerful but it may
also be too hard.

And it really doesn't handle very good HTML output -- aren't we supposed to be
on the internet already?

------
leif
writing math in this has got to be hell...especially when 'sup' is a
typesetting keyword

------
suckerpunch
The output of Latex is so annoyingly good that I would use it to make me a cup
of tea if I could ("there's a package for that", comes the faint cry). I use
it for essays, reports, and even our Ukulele Society's songbook. Versatile it
is.

But the problem is basically this:

You have to close your eyes, cover your ears and hum loudly when installing
and compiling, because if you thought about the error messages, the distro
size and all the binaries involved, you'd probably wish you were dead.
Nothing, no quality output justifies a piece of software like this, it's like
the elephant in the filesystem. I have nothing but admiration for the people
who put this together, because I couldn't fit a mental model of the Tex system
into two of my brains.

