This is so powerful, it makes me wonder why they didn't just make a new markdowny syntax for Latex so they could reuse everything from the Latex ecosystem. A bit like what CoffeeScript was for JavaScript, I mean.
That assumes that the only issue with LaTeX is its syntax. Other issues I can think of are that LaTeX doesn't generate HTML and that LaTeX is completely Unicode-disabled.
How do the science and math papers use characters that aren't in... ASCII? Maybe I need to look at an ASCII chart.
Out of curiosity, isn't UTF implementation much easier now than it has been? I piddle in writing things and I rarely contemplate UTF. Once I tried to reverse engineer an encryption plugin that used Asiatic characters as the ciphertext, and I wanted to use emoji, and that was when I learned I am too dumb to understand utf. But there's libiconv, which I first saw in production (ICQ or aim or Trillian or so) over 22 years ago, personally.
So is the latex thing obstinance, technical, or political?
Sorry you need to catch up! The latest LaTeX engines (LuaLaTeX) can even do unicode math! But yes the Unicode spec s not something one can understand in a few hours.
Other incorrect statement is that LaTeX cannot generate HTML. There is number of projects for LaTeX to HTML conversion (TeX4ht, Lwarp, LaTeXML), also Pandoc can convert subset of LaTeX to HTML.
Absolutely; One should also keep in mind why do you need the HTML, drop the pdf file on Google drive, and it will serve it fine, no webservers can limit who can see it, no friction for authorizations etc. Granted difficult to view on a mobile, but who can really do serious reading of a paper on mobile?
OK so either you're confirming that LaTeX is useless for anyone who actually needs to generate HTML and not PDF, or you're implying that nobody ever needs to use HTML and the whole Internet should just be PDFs?
I'm confused. Your first sentence implies that LaTeX can generate HTML and then you process to list other projects that you need. This whole thread is about an alternative to LaTeX which can actually genuinely just output HTML.
