Some thoughts on a ground-up remake of LaTeX

[Philip Taylor (Hellenic Institute)]

On 06/11/2021 15:44, Don Hosek wrote:

> As David says, this is a ground-up language. By separation of concerns 
> there’s a good possibility to manage some interesting use cases. The 
> architecture is not unlike a contemporary compiler in that the parsing 
> is done to an intermediate representation which will then be converted 
> to the final output, but this means that, for example, someone could 
> plug a XML parser into the front end and use all of the back-end 
> capabilities for typesetting. There will be multiple back ends 
> allowing the same file to reliably target output to PDF, HTML/ePub, 
> XML+MathML or even InDesign or Word. I’m thinking that a 
> direct-to-screen backend will make sense for the beamer-equivalent and 
> give greater flexibility than is currently possible using PDF 
> presentation mode. But that’s all many years in the future. Right now 
> all I can do is take a text file with TeX-style coding of -- --- `` ‘’ 
> etc.¹ and output the corresponding Unicode characters.

OK, thank you, understood Don.  But why, then, do you want to "take a 
text file with TeX-style coding of -- --- `` ‘’ etc.¹ and output the 
corresponding Unicode characters", when in your manifesto you write 
"Unicode needs to be a first-class citizen. There’s no reason in 2020 
for a document writer to have to type |\’a| instead of |á| in a 
document. UTF-8 is the new 7-bit ASCII." ?  Who, these days, writes -- 
--- `` ‘’ when they can so easily write –, —, “, ” ?

-- 
/** Phil./

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