Re: [tlug] Poll: OpenOffice or LibreOffice?

[Simon Cozens <simon@example.com>]

On 20/05/2014 23:06, Travis Cardwell wrote:
> *Many* people dream of replacing (La)TeX! ;)

Replacing (La)TeX is easy. The problem is replacing CTAN/BibTeX/etc. People 
aren't going to shift to a technically better solution until it does all the 
things they can currently do and more. This is why I haven't made any 
grandiose claims about my own code yet. :-)

> I think that TeX (a Turing-complete, macro-based programming language) is
> what makes LaTeX most inaccessible... I would be very interested in a
> replacement that produces comparable output yet uses a more modern language.

My project[1] takes the following approach: it uses the TeX algorithms for 
justification, hyphenation, boxes-and-glue etc. - so the output is definitely 
comparable - but reimplemented in Lua[2]; it decouples the input language from 
the typesetter and allows multiple input languages; it provides two input 
handlers, one which is XML-based (intended for input processed 
programmatically from another source or generated by a GUI front-end) and one 
which is a bit TeX-like for manual input. The TeX-like language is 
considerably simplified; commands copy what has become the de facto standard 
for LaTeX:

	\commandname[key=val,key=val,key=val]{content}

Or (equivalently)

	\begin[key=val,key=val,key=val]{commandname}
	content
	\end{commandname}

You can define very simple text replacement macros, but by design you are 
forced to define commands in a Lua extension for anything more complicated 
than that.

I'm just negotiating a grant to develop some more needed features, as some 
people are interested in using it for a large project.

[1] https://github.com/simoncozens/sile/

[2] I first wrote SILE in Javascript but the language snobs got to me so I 
tried Lua instead. It's good enough.