Thats what I thought too. However, there's a plethora of tools that can generate (and parse!) XML for you, e.g. HAML or Markdown. I write all my TeX docs in Markdown and then convert it to TeX, but stuff like figure placement has to be done in weird comments containing TeX, which'd be easier with RhinoType.

HAML for content: http://chriseppstein.github.io/blog/2010/02/08/haml-sucks-fo... (its not so bad :P)

> I write all my TeX docs in Markdown and then convert it to TeX

Is there some program that converts Markdown into TeX? Or are you saying that you do this manually?

Pandoc! [1]

[1]: http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/

Pandoc handles this pretty well in all the scenarios I've used it in.

Pandoc does this well. It's what I use.

Plus it's already been done to death in XML with XSL:FO, which does the job quite nicely. I don't think it'd be too tricky to rig up an XSL:T for the XML format here to produce FO and run that through Apache FOP.

LaTeX is much nicer to hand edit, and if you're not hand editing you may as well use Word or something.

As much as I agree to your dislike of XML as very unwieldy, LaTeX does have \begin and \end directives for environments.

Definitely agree that at a per-paragraph level that's way too much markup.

That's the thing, though: environments are not the norm.

I'm writing a document. I want the default text entry to be that document. There's already a lot of noise in my Latex sources; I want less, not more. (And I recognize that we actually agree on this.)

It supports a reStructuredText format as well, which is explained in the last paragraph of the "Example Documents and Input Formats" section <http://www.mos6581.org/introducing-rinohtype#example-documen....