Or, it could be that TeX has been cobbled together over decades with little design guidance or vision, resulting in a mishmash of approaches and inefficient code.

To me almost everything in TeX feels like a hack, even if the fundamental idea is good and the sum of all hacks ends up looking pretty good. The fact that it's a huge hack that takes 1.3GBs to install is not a gauge of quality.

It only takes 1.3 GB if you install every package ever invented. A normal installation of TeX Live takes about 200 MB and includes all the binaries (including tex, pdftex, xetex and luatex), a full LaTeX and ConTeXt and a whole bunch of other libraries.

I usually just install that, and then tlmgr any missing packages instead of downloading a gigabyte of TeX code I'll never need.

The full TeXLive is 1.3GB large, because it ensures that the only thing you need to build any semi-sane TeX document is this installation.

Describing TeX as Code misses the topic by a wide margin, a lot of the things in the distribution are fonts and compiled versions of the documentation.

Bash the idea of treating TeX as code out of your head and you will find it quite a bit saner.

I don't think anything will ever convince me Tex is a sane design. For instance, this SO on trying to set a5 paper size:

https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/22917/a5paper-settin...

(If you thought setting a5paper would result in your output paper size being A5, think again. facepalm)

> a) markdown isn't expressive enough. In fact it's pretty horrendous to edit and separate content and layout IMHO. I'd go as far to say I prefer docbook over markdown. It's fine for github readme's but not typesetting.

More people should understand this before suggesting Markdown as a solution. For a better experience on github or bitbucket you can use reStructuredText and Org-mode. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightweight_markup_language#Co...

I think they're all pretty poor. Sure they're a reasonable choice for conversion to HTML but they're only a subset of that and HTML is pretty easy to write and separate style and content these days.

Hm.

The point of these compile-to-html languages (eg. markdown) is that you're abstracting away from the display formatting as much as possible.

It's easy to say that you can just use HTML as content-only and style it using CSS, but the reality is that HTML is primarily a display format; it's pretty much unavoidable having classes, ids & DOM node structure in HTML that govern display behavior.

By abstracting concepts (paragraph, heading, list, etc) out, you can render them as components however you like into the HTML. Which means if you decide to change how they're rendered, you can do it all at once by editing the template.

Markdown & it's kin are certainly not perfect, but I'm pretty sure writing directly into HTML for your content is a generally really terrible idea.

(that said, with web components we will be able to do this directly in HTML by creating custom data-driven tags, so maybe that's the future. ...but it's not quite here yet)

Show me the part of Markdown (and its kin) that allows me to distinguish why the text is appearing in (or, rather, marked up in a manner that normally translates to) italics or bold (hint: you can't assume stress, and simply holding to current conventins is only good for ephemera). Where do the language tags for foreign words and phrases go? Are asides, callouts and infoboxes really the same things as blockquotes? HTML may not quite be SGML, but it is an awful lot richer than Markdown (and its kin) even if no attention is paid to styling. (I haven't used a class or id whose only purpose was styling in a decade. They either have a relationship to the document structure or they don't exist.)

True but I listed two options available which aren't as bad as Markdown. There isn't even one Markdown but several extensions as far as I can see and Markdown looks like a proof of concept sent to production and later extended at various customer sites.

Anecdotally lots of people are using Markdown and Pandoc to get from lightweight files to decent PDF or HTML.

Ok, you're not going to use it if you need actual typesetting, for that just use TeX and be done with it. What we're seeing I think is the same type of backlash that spawned YAML from XML.

Funny thing is, the actual space for .docx or .odt could be shrinking, is it?

Docx and Odt will live forever. 99% of the population will continue to use them. Hell I write hundreds of pages of documentation every year in Word 2010 and use LibreOffice at home because its easy. I use LaTeX for anything that is 'published'.

I hope we don't get another YML, an inferior and minute subset of XML's capabilities with all its problems and none of its advantages and tooling. I've used XML for years and once you understand it properly it's fine.

Call me old school but I find lightweight markup to be a hack job.

> Call me old school but I find lightweight markup to be a hack job.

The best way to think of it is that markdown is a replacement for .txt. It's not a typesetting language, it's just a conventional way to structure text documents.

Most of the elements of markdown are already there in .txt files from the 80s and 90s. All markup does is standardize how to do headers, lists, code blocks and bold/italic so that you can generate documents that actually contain those elements, but could also just treat a markdown file as a normal .txt.

I really like starting documents where I write most text with Markdown, but write out any equations with LaTeX syntax. Pandoc works great for this.

Invariably, if I work on the document for any lengthy period of time, I end up giving up on using Markdown. I'll generate LaTeX output using Pandoc and just start editing it manually.

AsciiDoc is just as readable as Markdown, but semantically equivalent to DocBook

That's very interesting. I haven't looked at AsciiDoc before.

I have been studying AsciiDoc lately. It turns out to be a really hacked-together macro language for creating "ad-hoc lite markup" to "SGML/XML-based semantic markup" conversions. The core idea and the default ad-hoc lite markup are both pretty nice, but the implementation leaves a lot to be desired. AsciiDoctor is an alternative implementation which is used on GitHub and in other places, but I believe it interprets AsciiDoc as more of a "fixed format" like Markdown than the original reconfigurable macro-based approach.