Wednesday, August 26, 2009

compose-tex vs AFT

I've been doing some AFT hacking for a person who needed some text support. There are many AFT alternatives out there these days but he says that AFT hits the spot because it produces LaTeX as well as HTML.

There are some decent LaTeX to HTML converters out there too (have been for years).

I've been thinking about making a simple "free-ish text" converter that produces only LaTeX. It would be a LaTeX helper of sort. It would allow a casual user the ability to produce very high quality print without the learning curve of LaTeX.

The trick is, the "almost free text" format markup would have to be beautiful. The idea is "beautiful plain text in", "beautiful print out".

What if everyone could produce beautiful print? What would you typeset?

1 comment:

  1. I've used AFT for a long time, and liked it very much. What it can't do is to make a standard fiction manuscript; a header like "Smith / TITLE / 3" at the right top of each non-first page, double-spaced, etc. The specs are not that hard, and there's an SFFMS class for LaTeX, but LaTeX is overkill. If I had a magic wand that's what I'd persuade AFT to do -- to do standard fiction submission format and generate RTF, LaTeX, html.

    Just my $.02.

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