publisher VS KeenWrite

https://github.com/speedata/publisher/tree/develop/qa (the tests)

The link: https://www.speedata.de/

See for example the directory here: https://github.com/speedata/publisher/tree/develop/src/go/server

I have a related feeling about TeX. It has superb output quality but the programming is awful. When LuaTeX finally arrived a few years ago, it was possible to do almost everything you have done before in the TeX language (starting with \backslashes) in Lua.

See http://wiki.luatex.org/index.php/TeX_without_TeX for an introduction.

I have (shameless plug) created a database publishing software using this technique (https://github.com/speedata/publisher/). Once in a while I have to use LaTeX and it feels a bit old school to do the macro programming.

My next project is to rewrite the TeX algorithms in Go - see https://github.com/speedata/boxesandglue. Already usable but not TeX like in any way (this is just a library, not a frontend software like TeX)

LuaTeX is what TeX should have been from the start (and would have been, if the technology of the time had permitted it). Apart from modern Unicode and font-handling, the main thing IMO is the hooks it provides (in the form of callbacks).

With other TeX engines (mainly: pdfTeX, XeTeX, or the original Knuth TeX), the only "programming" facility is in the form of macros, which were originally added by Knuth only for some simple text substitution to save typing. He never intended to add programming features into TeX, but of course, it doesn't take much to become "accidentally Turing-complete", and that's what TeX macros became. (There's also some rudimentary support for counters/registers, which Knuth added after he found users were (ab)using macros to encode numbers using unary or Church numerals.) So the only way to influence anything TeX does automatically, whether it's hyphenation or line-breaking or page-breaking or whatever, is to set up some macros whose blind expansion will ultimately result in the outcome you want, without affecting anything else (e.g. even an accidental space might get typeset with undesirable results). This of course is cumbersome and error-prone.

With LuaTeX you can program these things at the level you actually intend, e.g. while you can still use macros (or use the `process_input_buffer` callback in Lua), you can now also directly, say, influence the page layout, in a Lua callback that is actually aware of data at the relevant level of abstraction (the vboxes on the page, say), rather than everything being at the lowest (text expansion) level.

Knuth has said that he never intended for TeX macros to be used as a full-fledged programming language (he expected people would directly edit the SAIL/Pascal code of the TeX program for anything nontrivial), and that he dislikes each tool coming with its own Turing-complete programming language, and that if a standard embeddable programming language had been available he'd of course have used it in TeX — I think Lua would count.

You can see "TeX without TeX" page on the LuaTeX wiki for an example of the power of LuaTeX, typesetting with TeX while completely bypassing TeX syntax: http://wiki.luatex.org/index.php/TeX_without_TeX — a more elaborate production system is Speedata Publisher: https://github.com/speedata/publisher

As for myself, here is the most fancy thing I did with LuaTeX: https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/401604/book-on-a-sin... (never "productionized" into a package or whatever). Also, something possibly illuminating is this TeX-vs-LuaTeX comparison of something hyphenation-related (https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/378704/how-to-avoid-...), and in this answer (https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/398310/why-in-2017-d...) I link to some other times I used LuaTeX, though some of them just use the Lua part of LuaTeX rather than LuaTeX hooks, such as computing digits of pi for generating pretty pictures (https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/367902/tikz-color-op...).

KeenWrite is my free, open-source, cross-platform desktop Markdown editor that can produce beautifully typeset PDFs. I started working on it years ago to help write a novel that has a complex timeline and I couldn't find a text editor that would allow me to integrate a character sheet with the story itself.

https://github.com/DaveJarvis/keenwrite

Tutorials:

* https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLB-WIt1cZYLm1MMx2FBG9...

Here's what I mean by using variables directly:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFCqe3A5dFg

CommonMark doesn't propose a standard for bibliographic references. Would anyone find the editor more appealing if it had cross-references and citations?

My cross-platform desktop text editor, KeenWrite, allows users to define variables in an external YAML file. The editor calls out to Kroki[1] to convert text-based diagrams to SVG. The diagrams can reference variables and are rendered using EchoSVG[2].

KeenWrite[3] can produce PDF documentation from Markdown documents that has PlantUML diagrams with elements stored in an external, machine-readable file. Here are screenshots showing variables on the left, diagram text in the middle, and a real-time render on the right:

* https://raw.githubusercontent.com/DaveJarvis/KeenWrite/main/...

* https://raw.githubusercontent.com/DaveJarvis/KeenWrite/main/...

KeenWrite supports all diagrams offered by Kroki, which includes "diagram-plantuml".

[1]: https://kroki.io/

[2]: https://github.com/css4j/echosvg/

[3]: https://github.com/DaveJarvis/keenwrite

Although not interactive, I've created a video series that shows advanced usage of Markdown. Namely R, external variables, diagrams, math, annotations, and a different approach to metadata:

* https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLB-WIt1cZYLm1MMx2FBG9...

Tutorial 4 shows basic Markdown:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNbGSiRzx-0

The top-right of each video shows keyboard and mouse clicks to help follow along.[1] My desktop text editor, KeenWrite[2], is used in the tutorials.

[1]: https://github.com/DaveJarvis/kmcaster

[2]: https://github.com/DaveJarvis/keenwrite

https://github.com/DaveJarvis/keenwrite/blob/main/scripts/bu...

My template script provides a way to make user-friendly shell scripts. In a script that uses the template, you define the dependencies and their sources:

    DEPENDENCIES=(

I didn't create the fork, nor am I affiliated with the project. I use it in my text editor, KeenWrite to rasterize SVG.

KeenWrite Themes[1] are instructions that tell ConTeXt how to typeset XHTML documents (content) into PDF files (presentation). I made a tutorial that shows how my FOSS desktop text editor, KeenWrite[3], allows users to write in Markdown to typeset a document against a particular theme.

Before it can be used for scientific papers, it needs cross-references, which, unfortunately, aren't part of the CommonMark specification.

I posit that the vast majority of LaTeX users don't grok how to separate content from presentation. When I asked a question on TeX.SE about how to adjust the line spacing between enumerated items (spanning a couple dozen enumerated lists), the vast majority of people voted for the answer of using `\itemsep0em` to tweak each list ... individually.[4] The correct answer, IMO, is to fix the problem globally, and not waste time tweaking individual lists.

[1]: https://github.com/DaveJarvis/keenwrite-themes

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QpX70O5S30

[3]: https://github.com/DaveJarvis/keenwrite

[4]: https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/6081/reduce-space-be...