On Thu, Jul 17, 2003 at 01:44:35PM +0000, Vittorio wrote: > Thanks for the interesting answers. In the end I'm going to stick to LaTeX. > > As a matter of fact, in an Italian newsgroup "a LaTeX expert" said > that the disadvantage of LaTeX was its not being a "functional > typesetting language" but a macro language to work with it is > necessary to put together heaps and heaps of packages often > "colliding" them because of compatibility problems. Instead he > advocated of a superiority of a functional language like lout...
As a more or less experienced LaTeX user (at least _I_ think my document code is clean and functional) I think that he's right. I think anyone who has looked through the package coding will know that it really looks ugly, although you must keep in mind that most packages most users come across are 'generated by the doc-strip utility' and thus are stripped of all comments (and structure). So lout seems interesting in this respect. On the other hand, a document formatting system should also be good at typesetting things. Since I use LaTeX primarily for scientific writing, I need a typesetting engine which is very good at math, since my equations are not of the E=mc^2 type. Famous formula, but not that hard to typeset. Although the lout 'language' seems interesting enough to try it out sometime, I haven't seen nice 'mathematical' results, yet. I'll probably leave it for now and look it up in a number of months. First, I'll finish my Master's thesis in LaTeX. David -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
