

LaTeX3 Roadmap - gnosis
http://www.texdev.net/2011/09/05/latex3-roadmap/

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jessriedel
I honestly believe that _the_ most cost-effective way to advance math and hard
science research in the United States would be for some person or organization
to put down $1 million to hire some developers to produce an enterprise-
quality version of LaTeX, with an editor. The amount of grad student, post-
doc, and professor time that is wasted dealing with LaTeX is staggering.
There's just no reason grad students should need to spend, e.g., an hour to
figure out how to get columns working.

~~~
sciurus
The next time I need to create that kind of publication, I plan to try ConTeXt
to see if it is any better than LaTeX.

"LaTeX was created with the idea of separating content and presentation to
such an extent that the typical author would write their content and then use
a style file created by someone else to provide the visual presentation. Thus,
the proliferation of style files and related things. ConTeXt, on the other
hand, retained the idea of separating content and presentation, but was
created with the idea of being used for books, where each book tends to have a
different layout, and so the expected 'end user' is the person doing all the
layout. Thus, it's designed to provide a vast amount of flexibility for layout
in a way that can be fairly easily defined without needing to write a package
(or go find one that's already written)."

"ConTeXt is a macro package that’s far more advanced than LaTeX. You can
enhance LaTeX with third party packages, but not all macro packages work
together with each other. ConTeXt is an integrated, powerful and flexible
macro package for which you seldom need third party packages."

<http://wiki.contextgarden.net/Main_Page>

~~~
mturmon
The Context graphics have always looked excellent.

Problem is, if you need to submit your publication to a journal, then you
would have to convert it to ordinary LaTeX, and that would suck.

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ggchappell
How seriously should we take this? The LaTeX 3 project is almost twice as old
as Perl 6. It was in development for years even before the first announcement
of Duke Nukem Forever. That's a long time, folks.

Certainly, LaTeX could use an update. And I applaud those working on it. But
really, is it going to happen?

