On Sun, Aug 22, 2010 at 01:15:40PM +0200, Martin Kopta wrote: > Hi everyone, > > I wrote my bachelor thesis using LaTeX and now I am going to write my > master thesis. I would rather avoid TeX and everything TeX based this time. > > The PDF output of (La)TeX is awesome and I really like that part of it, but > writting itself was painful, since the language is pretty cryptic and complex > for 'simple document like thesis'. Overhelming compilation output completely > hides any warnings and errors, which are too fuzzy and useless anyway. Also, > work with images is pretty much impossible and texlive package is too big in > size. > > I am currently looking for some replacement with: > > * input as plain text (NOT xml) > * simple syntax/commands/language > * output as PDF (acceptable as thesis), may be indirectly > * usable compilator (readable overall output, warnings and errors) > * overall good design > > I guess my demands are too high, but if you know about something interesting, > please, let me know. > > Thank you, > dum8d0g
This is probably not what you're looking for, but last year I've been using lout[1] (that website is awful, btw) for all of my university documents. It's not really suckless, but I think that overall it's better than LaTeX. The syntax feels rather lisp-y (it's actually a functional language), but is much easier to extend and program than TeX. It's written entirely in C and the lout distribution is *much* smaller than (La)TeX. $ du -sh lout.lib/ 5.5M lout.lib/ lout outputs directly to postscript, so compiling to pdf is rather easy. $ lout test.lout | ps2pdf - test.pdf Links: [1] http://lout.wiki.sourceforge.net/
