Mrthfx

I truly believe nothing comes close to TeX (and Friends, e.g. LaTeX, ConTeXt) when it comes to output quality.

Other DTP programs such as Indesign (Adobe), QuarkXPress (Quark) or Scribus (open source) offer a graphical interface and hence an easier learning curve, but they don't match up in terms of quality. Amongst many, let me just point the two most obvious quality advantages of TeX:

Math typesetting

Typesetting maths correctly is very complex (symbols need to adjust in size, spaces are very specific, etc.), and only TeX gets it right. There are probably even better examples, but try obtaining something like the following in InDesign:

Line and page breaking

Tex's algorithm is very complex and takes into account possible hyphens, widows, orphans, etc. to produce an output that is more elegant.

The best showcase of this I have found is a comparison posted by Roel Zinkstok of Zink Typography, reproduced below. On the comparison, Roel indicated with red dots lines with inter-word spacing that is out of proportion, a cardinal sin for typography, while the red circles indicate hyphens, which should be minimized:

A shameless plug: We are offering a professional typesetter (though open source) which is based on LuaTeX. If it is "equal or even better" than LaTeX is surely subjective.

Our focus is to bring the DTP world to automatic typesetting (database publishing). For example we have

• master pages based on arbitrary conditions


• text flow based on "frames"


• multi page tables including subtotals and repeating tablehead and tablefoot


• easy to install/use fonts


• grid based layout/typesetting


• ...

While TeX / LaTeX is focused on text documents (with or without math) our main application area is product catalogs, price lists and other documents that are created automatically from databases but have flexible and nice layouts.

http://speedata.github.io/publisher/

I'd like to invite everyone to try out or perhaps work on the software. Development never ends (as usual).

Troff (http://troff.org/) should definitely be mentioned for its simplicity. I normally use LaTeX for all my documents, but for some special cases (e.g. user manuals) troff (or it's GNU version groff) is just the simpler way. It also can handle math using the preprocessing tool eqn. A nice comparison between troff and LaTeX can be found here.

GNU TeXMacs is a WYSIWYG scientific structured document editor and typesetter. It used to require a TeX distribution but now it does not.

Here is a list of not so widely known typesetting systems that I found googling around, mostly work-in-progress (or work-used-to-be-in-progress):

• cl-typesetting is written in Common Lisp, which implies that its markup language is also Common Lisp. (Macro language, anyone?)




• The Z format looks like HTML, but is not.




• Platypus commands look like [list|bullet:{rarrow}]
. Written in Java.



• 
  

  Patoline, written in OCaml. Also handles SQL bibliography databases, and comes with Bibi, a bibfile to SQL converter written in Haskell. (The developers seem to be really keen on functional languages.) You have to build it from source. Commands look like a mixture of TeX, OCaml and new markup:

  
  
  

  (* #FORMAT FormatArticle *)
  
  begin{genumerate}(AlphaLower, fun s -> [tT (s^". ")])
  
  item First item
  
  item Second item
  
  end{genumerate}
  
  includeGraphics("pato.png")
  
  $$ a + b $$
  
  $ a + b $
  
  Caml(
  
    let dr ()=
  
      [bB (fun _->
  
        [Drawing (drawing [Path (default,[rectangle (0.,0.) (10.,10.)])])]
  
     )]
  
  )
  
  

  
  
  

  _{Note that I have no idea if this code works, I just copied together parts of the manual.}

  
  


• 
  

  SILE (Simon's Improved Layout Engine) is written in Lua with the Pango and Cairo libraries. It also tries to provide a syntax nearly identical to that of LaTeX:

  
  
  

  begin[class=book,papersize=129mm x 198mm]{document}
  
  include[src=examples/macros.sil]
  
  script[src=packages/grid]
  
  left-running-head{A Scandal in Bohemia}
  
  right-running-head{hfill{}Alexander Conan Doyle}
  
  headline{A Scandal In Bohemia}
  
  
  
  noindent To Sherlock Holmes she is always em{the woman}.
  
  footnote{Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.}
  
  
  
  begin[family=Snell Roundhand]{font}
  
  Consequetur adipiscing elit.
  
  end{font}
  
  end{document}
  
  

  
  



• Rinohtype, written in Python. The input format is reStructuredText. See an example input file.

Maybe more to come.

First, add XyVision to the list of proprietary batch composition competitors.

Here's a bit of commentary I wrote up a couple of years ago, which still applies. It's also on the ConTeXt wiki.

https://groups.google.com/forum/message/raw?msg=comp.text.tex/8zugdUxw6dI/mu7Qzs4bQDYJ

So,

• using Quark is like being chained to an oar which is covered w/
  splinters and mostly broken at the other end and which will randomly
  break due to being poorly carved (Quark has crashed on me 183 times
  this year) leaving one adrift or run aground, or sometimes returning
  the vessel to its starting point (a few of those crashes have resulted
  in unrecoverable document corruption --- my autobackup folder may
  contain 2 or 3 GBs of files for a given iteration of a particular
  project each month) --- the oar can be smoothed somewhat and reinforced
  (by purchasing or finding XTensions, using XTags &c.) and periodically
  one is required to purchase a new oar (sometimes just after the
  previous one has been customized adequately). For some tasks, one can
  impress any graphic designer as a galley slave to ease the effort for
  others, but while charts are available, there are not automagic
  navigation options and every journey must be manually piloted.




• using InDesign is pretty much the same except the oar is smoother
  and stronger (it's crashed 29 times on me thus far this year), there
  aren't as many customization options and it's not quite as easy to find
  a candidate for impressment (though soon it'll be as easy as for
  Quark). Charts are available, but again, piloting is strictly manual.




• using Plain TeX one has to craft the vessel's oar oneself (as well
  as the rest of the vessel unless one is typesetting a clone of The
  TeXbook), but it's as sturdy and as nice a one as one's skills allow
  and can even be an engine which moves the vessel in and of itself ---
  it can be difficult or impossible to find people suitable to help w/
  either carving the oar or using it though, but once a given journey is
  worked out, the oar becomes magical and rows for itself except for when
  one runs into an unplanned for obstacle (the navigation charts are old
  ones and not often up-dated, with a lot of ``terra incognita''),
  allowing one an auto-pilot option for certain journeys, dependent upon
  one's skill.




• using ePlain, an oar is provided, can be customized, and can be
  enchanted and the charts are okay, but have a lot of ``terra
  incognita'' on them.




• using LaTeX, an oar is provided and there're lots of nifty
  customizations and improvements already available, and one can impress
  additional oars from CTAN, however on a semi-random basis, adding one
  oar will break other oars, sometimes leaving one adrift or run aground.
  One can enchant a set of oars to accomplish a given journey, easing the
  piloting requirement, and the navigation charts are decent and
  obstacles are fairly well-known.




• using ConTeXt, a very nice oar is provided, which has lots of
  customization options, but the navigational charts aren't easily read
  by a traditionally trained navigator at first, although they are fairly
  compleat and most journey can be carefully worked out, but once one is,
  it is quite automatic and there's a good auto-pilot option.

A new alternative is Patoline, which is still in an early development stage but the goal is to be a modern digital typesetting system.

As for the LaTeX compatibility one can describe the Patoline compiler as

Obviously, a related (but much smaller) project is the Patoline compiler, which compiles a mixed Wiki/LaTeX/Ocaml syntax into a variety of output formats, including traditional PDF files, but also web servers that deliver dynamic contents, synchronized for instance with a talk.

The documentation includes a PhD thesis and a description of the syntax which was produced using Patoline, and which looks to me as an amateur in typesetting pretty good:

While LaTeX is the markup language of choice in many scientific and scholarly circles (especially in the fields of mathematics, computer science, physics, and astronomy), some scholars are starting to write papers using new markup languages tailored for the web. Markdown is one of them. It is very versatile and it can be easily extended to satisfy the needs of scientific writing. The advantage of using Markdown (or similar) instead of LaTeX is that we are writing on the web more than ever. Thus, it makes sense to use a web native typesetting format. For those who would like to use both Markdown and Latex on the web, Authorea (full disclosure, I am a co-founder) is an online social authoring platform that allows articles to be edited in both formats simultaneously. Authorea also renders and compiles LaTeX and MathML equations to the web, in addition to PDF.

TeX and friends maybe still the best. There are some alternative and results are various. I do not really use any of them, but kind of know there existence.

• Lout


• ANT

As long as you don't need mathematical typesetting, you actually can find better than TeX with Heirloom Documentation Tools. Not only does it provide Knuth's algorithm for formatting paragraphs; it also allows to compute spacing by mixing three systems (interletters spacing, interwords spacing, imperceptible change in the shapes of the glyphs). Thus you can work with constant space between words! Selecting a font among various kinds of fonts is much easier and quicker than with TeX. I have been using it for years while my colleagues use LaTeX; they wouldn't have the idea to only think their documents can be on a par with mine. If you are interested in typography, then Heirloom version of troff is definitely the way to do.

edit: Since I first wrote this answer, it looks like new pieces of software have appeared. I just heard about utroff which seems to come from Heirloom troff; I will very certainly have a look at it and probably use it now because Heirloom troff doesn't seem to be actively maintained and may be difficult to compile.

Scientific Word can be another alternative software for scientists:
http://www.mackichan.com/index.html?products/sw.html~mainFrame

Pollen, written in Racket (of the Lisp family). The primary focus is web-based typography (and no math so far), but it can also support other formats such as pdf.

R Markdown runs on the TeX distribution when using kntr to create PDFs. But, to type in it requires less code memorization since R produces default YMAL headers when you load up a new document.