Lately I happened to not tolerate anymore the ugly dirac spec, the pdf produced is w/out a index, the font are horrible and the reason is that they made use of latex instead of something saner (docbook anyone?)
This rant isn’t about the dirac spec anyway, the content isn’t bad at all, is just the presentation.
This rant isn’t even about their usage of latex, it is pretty much correct and produces documentation even if you have an ancient tex distribution (tetex).
Now my angry words are at latex in itself since it is the root of the problem.
Latex pros:
– large library of modules, styles stuff
– large userbase
– very nice programs that makes use it less annoying (kile)
Latex cons:
– Doesn’t support truetype fonts out of box, nor lots of image formats.
– It’s default fonts are anything but beauty on screen
– the syntax is between bad and ugly
– you end up with overcomplicated systems to keep your documents in shape
– you spend more time figuring out what to use instead of using it (and the time isn’t short)
– the document build system isn’t exactly an example of clarity.
Seems that many of those issue got addressed on texlive, that sadly we don’t have in portage since few people would touch tex since it is an ugly monster.
All in all you may think that latex is good enough since there aren’t saner alternatives if you want produce a book that doesn’t look a wordprocessor printout… Well, there are nicer alternatives IMHO, one being xml markups since you can convert them with ease (almost), you may produce them using maybe quicker markups (e.g. texy), you can mix and match them (including mathml and svg in docbook isn’t difficult. Sadly there aren’t good authoring tools like kile. Would be simpler make a good authoring tool (yea, I know emacs is wonderful for xml editing) or make latex less ugly from an user and developer POV?
Might look at xxe for editing docbook gui-style…
Biggest latex con is the quality of HTML output people produce from latex source, especially given how important the HTML output is likely to be nowadays.
Anyhow, if you’re already an emacs user and want to write docbook I’d recommend qemacs, as it has a nice visual editing mode. The docbook mode is actually the only reason I have qemacs installed, I prefer xemacs as my normal emacs.
I am actually trying to code a simple latex alternative that outputs the code directly to xhtml + mathml. The syntax is something along the lines of:
–Header1 Some text–
Some more text –Math sin(5)/pi–
–H2 A new –Color header– —
But its alot of work…so I don’t think it really will get of the ground.