[pdftex] TeX as a composition server?

[Paul Isambert]

  Le 24/10/2010 01:31, ivo welch a écrit :
> won't be me.  I am a casual user, though I do donate to various causes.
>
> yes, it would be great if someone wrote a replacement for TeX and
> LaTeX, taking the typesetting language and yanking the macro language.
>   unfortunately, nothing whatsoever seems to be on the horizon.  heck,
> I would pay good money for an alternative.  no such thing exists.

Try InDesign. It's TeX without the language. Plus it's WYSIWYG. And 
you'll pay good money, don't you worry.
Or you might give a look at ANT.

> TUG has no real power, but it has moral suasion, and it does produce
> the de-facto standard through its TeXLive distributions.

Except Windows user mostly go for MikTeX.

>    if it shows
> no leadership, no one else will, either.

So what? It's free software after all...

>    (yes, luatex may not be
> ready, but when it is, making it THE standard would be a step in the
> right direction.)

I think LuaTeX could become the standard engine but I won't force 
people. They're free to use whatever engine they prefer. You know why? 
Because if some years ago, somebody had said the same about formats, if 
TUG had enforced LaTeX as the ``standard'', well, the TeX world would be 
much less fun for me today. LaTeX is the /de facto/ standard, and I find 
that sufficiently annoying, so I don't want it to become an official 
standard either. The same with engines: I might be a plain TeX user that 
doesn't want to input thousands of lines of exotic code to use ttf and 
otf fonts (the LuaTeX way), or another plain TeX user that doesn't want 
fonts to be unanalyzable entities (the XeTeX way). There are two ways to 
go, why reduce them to a single path?

Best,
Paul/
/
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