I've used TeX with eplain and for many purposes it's great, but publishers and coauthors essentially mandate LaTeX for real papers.
Pollen is intriguing[1,2], but way too early to say anything about. If TeX or LaTeX are going to be displaced any time soon, it's going to be because of textbooks published on the web (caveat: unfounded speculation on my part, but read on). I'm sure it's possible to embed a dynamic simulation into a pdf, for example, but nothing like what can be put online. And LaTeX isn't designed to produce websites.
It doesn't shield you from much of the pain, initially at least. But you can separate it from the document and treat it as markup, and reuse bits more easily.
Of course pollen itself is a thing to learn. But if you work with text a lot and like lisp it might be worth it. It's been good to me.
You doubt that a LaTeX version exists, or that one is made available for publication? It is my understanding that part of the reason for writing TeX in the first place, was for use in personal publications...?
I can count like half a dozen TeX/LaTeX alternatives (SILE, Patoline, Platypus, Lout, some are more dead than the others) without even looking them up. It is easy to make a TeX/LaTeX alternative, it is hard to get people to use it.
I'm a PhD student, so I use LaTeX on a daily basis, and it makes me very sad that there's no viable alternative. LaTeX is a horrid mess of language design, mostly due to not being a language, but rather a set of macros on top of TeX, with all the problems you can imagine, esp. the error messages that makes a C++ template error read like Shakespeare in comparison.
The core pain of LaTeX may be summarized in only two words: poor composability. Anything (package) can break anything else. The environments offered by many package cannot be composed.
To top it off, almost no-one has an understanding of the underlying semantics of LaTeX. Few people even know how LaTeX macros work (and I'll include myself in that). LaTeX lives off cut and paste more than PHP and Javascript ever did. This is made more tragic by the fact that the people using LaTeX (in many cases academics, not script kiddies) should know better.
I really think there is a market in providing a clean replacement to LaTeX by the way. Seen the prevalence of LaTeX in large institutions, it wouldn't be hard to get them to pay for a better solution if you could get the users on your side.
LaTeX should be regarded as a legacy technology, not the future.
It's useful because it's a standardized language everyone knows and can be applied across the web, e.g. on many StackExchange sites (at least the TeX subset via MathJax), but it's too limited to be held up as a standard to move toward.
For a discussion of some of its limitations and things that can be improved: [The LATEX3 Project][1] (1999).
Personally, though, my main criticism of LaTeX is that its logic is static and based in plaintext. The future is in interactive documents (e.g., in the direction of [Wolfram's][2]), not statically compiling plaintext to image-like documents.
Of course, credit to where credit is due: LaTeX was a hugely powerful tool that's done a lot of good in the world. It also continues to be useful for many purposes, especially due to its widescale adoption from this bright history. It's a great page for the history books -- but, it's not the future.
Traditional, static documents will never go extinct, particularly in fields such as pure mathematics. If LaTeX3 wants to engage this crowd, it'd better offer substantial benefits, a fair amount of backward compatibility, or preferably both. In any event, LaTeX moved on from the original set of macros in 1983 to LaTeX 2.09 (anybody know when?) to LaTeX 2e in 1994... in the intervening quarter of a century LaTeX3 has been a work in progress... Maybe the goals set for the next version are too ambitious (see [1]), but clearly the inertia has been lost, a sign that the project has become fairly stable.
As with any long-term speculation, many years from now people may very well get rid of the TeX ecosystem altogether. During our lifetimes, though, I'm skeptical of seeing major changes in (pure) mathematics publishing. As unixhero pointed out, jupyter notebooks and the like will gain further adoption, and the applied math crowd, scientists and engineers will occasionally rant about having to choose between notebooks and LaTeX... c'est la vie!
Epub is ok, but it has no support for math equations (practically all implementations just dump them into raster images) and HTML's typography leaves much to be desired.
There are plenty of good reasons why TeX and LaTeX are still the workhorse of scientific publishing in spite of the emphasis on fixed format layouts.
This is so much what I am thinking each time I'm forced to write in LaTeX. But then again, there is already a ton of alternatives out there. HTML + CSS + JS for screens. Word, InDesign, Scribus for pdf.
The one thing that forces me back to LaTeX is bibtex. There is simply nothing that can replace it. Some tools come close, like Mendeley for Word, but they have issues too (like being controlled by a giant company).
I'll switch for anything that lets me markup documents, render equations, and use bibtex. At present LaTeX is the most comfortable option to do all these three, in spite of the countless issues I have with it.
I'm sort of skeptical that any of these will be usable as a complete replacement for a very long time. Heck, I can't even use pdflatex today because the toolchains for several conferences and journals (I'm looking at you, Journal of Functional Programming!) require both the output to have been emitted by the latex (chokes on the PDF otherwise) and for the document sources that you provide them to also be compileable with it.
Exactly. And I have a very strong feeling that without the ability to collaborate implicitly (at least on the text/math mode part), no replacement for LaTeX will catch on in my community (mathematics).
Historically, TeX and LaTeX have had their best penetration in Math, Physics, and Astronomy departments. Many journals in these fields only accept papers in TeX, and have their own templates.
This would be a horrible nightmare. LaTeX is an atrocious mess that deserves to die. Source: personal experience trying to build a decent programmatic table creator for LaTeX.
I am the author of a widely-used LA text, and have considered adding interactive stuff. But there is a tradeoff. For one thing, it locks you to online, and despite the claims of our IT people, my correspondents (mostly self-learners) do not want online, they want print or PDF (as do I, since the appearance that LaTeX gives me is important to me).
For another, the tech has in the recent past changed so fast that maintaining the interactives would be a significant job. I don't mind learning JS to do something good but tying myself to many hours a year responding to bug reports from people on obscure platforms, or using IE6, is not a good use of my life energy.
Finally, I had a colleague, a complex analyst, try Visual Complex Analysis and he reported that students did not get it. He is very sober, very caring, very reliable. This starts to make sense of his report.
In theory yes, but I think the problem is that it will never be adopted. Too much of academia is built on the deep assumption that LaTeX is the only possible format that people write documents in.
You're not wrong, but then again, this is not the biggest thing wrong with a lot of academic publishing, and it wouldn't be the biggest tower that a lot of academics are trying to topple. Indeed, breaking away from TeX and breaking away from the traditional journals and the toxic model around publishing in them might be happy partners.
Pollen is intriguing[1,2], but way too early to say anything about. If TeX or LaTeX are going to be displaced any time soon, it's going to be because of textbooks published on the web (caveat: unfounded speculation on my part, but read on). I'm sure it's possible to embed a dynamic simulation into a pdf, for example, but nothing like what can be put online. And LaTeX isn't designed to produce websites.
[1]: http://mbutterick.github.io/pollen/doc/
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7822057 (HN submission)
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