TeX and LaTeX set the bar high; it's hard to imagine something entirely new coming along and replacing them.
I've got a copy of Knuth's Computer Modern Typefaces (Book E in the Computers And Typesetting series, which I think is completed unlike TAOCP). I don't think many people get to see this book, and - indulge me - it really is worth looking at. You can see where some of Kunth's time went. Here's a quote from the preface:
Another piece of luck came my way in 1984, when I learned that the original bronze patterns used to make the molds of Monotype 8A were in San Francisco. For years I had been working with indirect and imprecise information about the fonts that had stimulated this work. First I had worked from photographic blowups of letterpress original pages from The Art of Computer Programming; then Richard Southall had prepared enlargements from original proofs he had located in England. At last I found the actual 80-year-old patterns that had generated the metal type. The present owner of these patters, Mr. Othmar Peters, kindly consented to let me borrow them while I was preparing the final draft of Computer Modern, and I learned much by measuring them with calipers.
You just don't get that kind of attention to detail in many places, and that's why TeX endures.
Quote: "LuaTeX is an extended version of pdfTeX using Lua as an embedded scripting language. The LuaTeX projects main objective is to provide an open and configurable variant of TeX while at the same time offering downward compatibility."
Lua is very easy and fast, so hopefully LuaTeX will not be as hard anymore... hopefully :)
You cannot retain "it has many extensions to reach different goals" with something new. By definition something new that is not TeX/LaTeX will start with no extension.
Having been a core contributor to the GNU TeXmacs project, which aims to be something like "TeX except for the 21st century", I think have some good insight on the succession of LaTeX.
I am not aware of anything on the horizon that is any likely of dethroning LaTeX. The people of influence in the mathematical community are just too used to using LaTeX to seriously consider the effort required to learn any tool that could be equally flexible.
Maybe in 20 years, when all the folks that got their PhD when LaTeX was cool are retired will something else replace it. Hopefully, it will be something like TeXmacs, but without the unnecessary complexity.
org-mode, an Emacs extension, is able to generate LaTeX and PDF files. org-mode syntax is similar to Markdown. It's just readable. There are only several LaTeX code lines inside the 20KB document. org-mode resolves three problems you mentioned - you get all the awesome features from LaTeX and get rid of its ugly syntax.
www.patoline.org is a great alternative to TeX/LaTeX systems. It has already been packaged for Arch Linux, NixOS, and can be compiled from source on many Unix-like systems.
You might also be interested in XeTeX, which is a modern version of LaTeX in that it supports Unicode and many fonts. You can use it to directly input Japanese, Arabic etc. in one document. (This doesn't address the disadvantages that you gave, but it's still relevant to the discussion about LaTeX' shortcomings and alternative systems! )
TEX is not great to work with. Tex is probably (I am not an expert in printing matters) good to provide a layer decoupling document from printing niceties and complexities.
The conceptual line is this : A mathematician is not a secretary, his main concern is WHAT he wants to show, not HOW to show it. So one more layer of abstraction is needed above that of Latex.
General goal : Hence there is a need (a dream) for a tool that allows to be much closer to what we can do by hand and of course faster than by hand (in fact I once saw a written answer scanned in .pdf catching red-handed one of the main author of Latex in not using it!).
Dream Tool specifications : (rough one to get the idea) S1. About an hour of initial time in the learning curve. S2. Allow to write a document quickly (by simple analogy) even when tired. S3. Cut and paste of seen formula available. S4. To correct a document faster than by hand (2 minutes instead of 5 by hand).
Today best tools abilities : S1. About the same. S2. Impossible while thinking about something else. S3. Cut and paste of formula description (implementation). S4. It take 20 minutes instead of 5 by hand (everything is specific you have to decipher back and forth).
Another example of sluggishness : Ask someone who wrote a latex document with 10 diagrams in category theory to draw all the squared ones in a slanted way, certainly not a quick job.
TeX is not a general purpose typesetting system: its core proficiency is in typesetting long texts with lots of math. In that it doesn't have any competition, I can imagine several reasons:
Donald Knuth was smart. He did amazing job with, for example, spacing in formulas.
Math notation changes across periods of time like centuries. There's a limited set of features that is necessary and thus no market for new typesetting systems.
Network effects. The only purpose of paper is to be read. Most papers advance on some others' research and are using their notation. With TeX you're sure you get the same fonts and the same spacing, and you have a technical ability to copy complex formulas from their papers.
In TeX it's trivial to define new macro, it's usually easy to say what a simple macros does from its definition and there many standard macro libraries. Any GUI-based system would likely make this process much less transparent.
While the drawbacks you quoted are real, it's much easier to look around for a decent editor/GUI shell built on top of TeX, of which are many, than to typeset in a different language. If you're into math, and want your articles to be preserved for decades, that is. For the general purpose typesetting, again, the programs you mentioned could well be a better choice.
After all this time, nobody told something very important.
LaTeX texts are written in a text file, it can be used for Literate programming, an style proposed by Don Knuth to write very well documented programs. The idea is to explain how the program was developed in a way similar to math text. Pieces of code are presented like the formulas, in mathematical texts. This is a great idea, after some time you can read how the program was conceived and you can modify the parts explaining why the decision was taken in the same way.
Other advantage is that you can generate LaTeX code as an output of your programs, in this way you can publish your results beautifully typeset, or use programs like gnuplot to generate graphs then generate LaTeX code for the graph and insert it in your text, that is great because the resulting file is very light compared to graphs exported to some image format, to include it with \includegraphics or worse if you are using some word processor by pasting it.
LaTeX is not really hard to learn, just take your pace, use what you need starting with simple documents. When you advance in your studies you will need to learn new features and packages. If you try to master LaTeX by learning all the packages just to become a LaTeX expert, you are wasting your time, there is a huge amount of packages, but you don't need to learn them all. Try to start with guides like "the not so short introduction to LaTeX" lshort.pdf, or "A Gentle Introduction to TeX" gentle.pdf. If you are tired of typing long macros, learn to write your own for the pieces you use more, the guides have a section about that.
Where to find information, in ctan.org, tug.org, do not search in latex.com that domain stands for the rubber material.
There is a TeX/LaTeX Catalog, search it in ctan.org it is very helpful when you need an special feature. You can find it here http://texcatalogue.sarovar.org/index.html, but you can search texcatalogue if this link becomes outdated.
To finish my comment, there is a great advantage that LaTeX and other software do not change of versions frequently, TeX/LaTeX is a very complete system for typesetting, you can add (and share) more features if you need something that does not exist. Learning LaTeX is a good time investment, you just need to learn it once, then dedicate to do you work, not to learn the new version.
P.S. I forgot to say that it is possible to write programs to translate LaTeX to other markup languages, (and word processors formats if documented) and vice versa. In deed there are several that give acceptable results, although as far as I know there is not yet a program that translates any LaTeX code, but for the more common texts you can find several programs to translate them to HTML, LibreOffice can export a word processor document to LaTeX, although it is not very useful because few word processor users use the tags to mark paragraphs as headers, quotations, etc. the vast majority mark the text to change the font, size, alignment, etc. and this is translated into LaTeX. But you may need to do this when collaborating with people that use word or LibreOffice, and you have to integrate it with you LaTeX text, just ask them to use the right markings or export it as text and insert the needed macros manually, after all you have to review the whole text of your collaborator.
Once there was need to translate it to HTML to publish on the net or make portable presentations, but now the bandwidth allows to transmit PDF files fast, and packages like beamer allows one to write very nice presentations.
The advantages of TeX/LaTeX are of the size of the packages that can be written on it an the will to share them. Thanks to Knuth for his great ideas, we are still waiting the full set of his Art of Computing Programming.
I think docbook is supposed to be an open xml based replacement for LateX.
"DocBook provides a system for writing structured documents using SGML or XML. It is particularly well-suited to books and papers about computer hardware and software, though it is by no means limited to them.
"In short, DocBook is an easy-to-understand and widely used DTD. Dozens of organizations use DocBook for millions of pages of documentation, in various print and online formats, worldwide."
That doesn't really cut into the main disadvantages of LaTeX, but no matter :) Regarding your point
"sometimes you have to type too much (begin{itemize} ... \end{itemize})"
this is entirely by design. There is a tradeoff between terse (and easier to type) and understandable (and longer to type). Longer names also have fewer collisions, since TeX and LaTeX don't support namespaces (unfortunately).
Anyway, a good editor will obviate the complaint above. Set up key-bindings or tab-completions or whatever else takes your fancy and you never have to write
Apart from the issue of graphics being hard to position, your other criticisms of LaTeX are more to do with its UI or lack thereof.
If you want to use LaTeX to produce your documents but want an easier way to use it then you should really check out LyX. It's a GUI front-end to LaTeX and address several of your issues: it makes LaTeX easier to learn (in fact, you don't have to even know LaTeX to create a simple, mathless document), it's more intuitive, and it saves you typing. It also adds spell-checking, better graphics handling, navigation, and more.
Because LyX is merely a front-end to LaTeX you still get beautifully presented documents. LyX documents are also plain text so version control works well. In fact, LyX has support for subversion built-in.
If you haven't already guessed, I heartily recommend LyX. I wrote my entire PhD thesis using it and found it very worthwhile.
我曾经在数学课上练习用 TeX 书写笔记，因为用 \sum_{n=1}^i 书写比在 MS Word 中查找符号要快。
Your four disadvantages can be summarized as "It's too hard", "It's too hard", "It's too hard" and finally, "It's too hard". I think the solution then is to learn how to use the system properly.
Any system that is designed for a novice will show deficiencies in other ways, loss of control or loss of flexibility. Try MS Word if you want it to be easier to place images. There's no way around simplicity without effort of learning the program. TeX supports definition macros, so you can change that \begin{itemize} tag into something more palatable like \bi if you so choose. Once you have sufficiently learned your nook of the LaTex world, it's just as fast as regular typing.
I used to practice taking notes in a math class by writing in TeX, because it was faster to write in \sum_{n=1}^i than trying to find the symbols in MS Word.
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By submitting this Internet-Draft, each author represents that any
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have been or will be disclosed, and any of which he or she becomes
aware will be disclosed, in accordance with Section 6 of BCP 79.
Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering Task
Force (IETF), its areas, and its working groups. Note that other groups
may also distribute working documents as Internet-Drafts.
Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months
and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any
Not really a successor, but you may want to look at *roff (groff, troff, nroff). I don't know much about it but I remember its format being terse. It is the tool used for man pages. Since I have only ever heard of it in passing, I can't give you any more help with it.
For example:
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Internet Draft J. Postel
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Status of this Memo
Distribution of this memo is unlimited.
By submitting this Internet-Draft, each author represents that any
applicable patent or other IPR claims of which he or she is aware
have been or will be disclosed, and any of which he or she becomes
aware will be disclosed, in accordance with Section 6 of BCP 79.
Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering Task
Force (IETF), its areas, and its working groups. Note that other groups
may also distribute working documents as Internet-Drafts.
Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months
and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any
XSL-FO might suit your needs. While it's not nearly as powerful as TeX, it does play well with XML formats like DocBook. A popular open source implementation is Apache FOP: http://xmlgraphics.apache.org/fop/.
If you need very fine control over typography, you're better off with TeX or a proprietary tool like FrameMaker or InDesign*.
*beware: InDesign currently has weak XML support IMO
我刚刚偶然发现 AsciiDoc 它看起来像一种简单的文本标记语言（ala markdown，textile），但它的功能要强大得多。 它大致相当于 DocBook，因此它可以发出 html、pdf，甚至 docbook xml 进行进一步处理。
I just stumbled upon AsciiDoc which looks like a simple text markup language (á la markdown, textile), but it's a lot more powerful. It's roughly equivalent with DocBook, so it can emit html, pdf, or even docbook xml for further processing.
I have only skimmed through it, but Emacs Muse http://mwolson.org/projects/EmacsMuse.html might be interesting (I'm interested if any one has more experienced with it. I like the idea of generating to several backends, latex, texinfo or stuff.)
Technically speaking Sphinx is not a replacement of LaTex but something that will make your life easier and that (if desired) generates PDF (via LaTex), HTML or plain text output for you.
Perhaps you have noticed the weird version numbers of TeX. When TeX reached version 3 Knuth didn't want TeX to evolve further into new versions like most software does. Instead he wanted it to converge to a final and bug-free TeX. Hence the version number now converges towards the mathematical number pi. After version 3 followed version 3.1, then 3.14 and the current version is 3.1415926.
In a similar fashion Metafont has a version that converges towards the mathematical number e (currently 2.718281).
Based on this, the answer to your question is that Knuth doesn't want TeX to evolve into TeX version 4.
上述工作流程与通常的工作流程非常相似，其中创作/编辑在 Word 中完成，排版使用 Indesign 或 Quark Xpress 完成。
Tools for particular jobs:
The strength of Latex2e is that it is a standard document preparation & representation language that is good for the representation of articles and books. It is, however, not really great for typesetting. This is not a bad thing: premature formatting is the root of all typesetting evil: most publishers simply throw away author formatting at the beginning of the copy-editing process.
Context is super for typesetting; they cannot compete with Latex as a document representation language, because it does not really solve any problems that should be solved at the document preparation/editing stage, so there is no reason for anyone to change from the well-established latex.
Rather than fix the unimportant-to-publishing flaws of Latex2e through the Latex3 effort, I would rather see effort put into developing the following workflow:
Document preparation: Latex2e
Copy-editing: Latex2e
Conversion: apply tool to take Latex2e -> Context
Typesetting: Context
Proofreading: make use of tool to check Latex2e content against Context content
Postscripts
The above workflow pretty much matches the usual workflow, where authoring/editing is done in Word, and typesetting is done using Indesign or Quark Xpress.
There is a LaTeX3 project that has been going on for basically forever. In that sense, it is a successor to the current LaTeX2e.
You forget/ignore the primary goal for TeX when it was created -- "TeX is a new typesetting system intended for the creation of beautiful books". The goal of TeX was typesetting, and its primary concerns were things like "Breaking Paragraphs Into Lines" (Donald E. Knuth and Michael F. Plass, Software--Practice and Experience, Vol. 11, pp. 1119-1184, 1981), ligatures, kerning, beautiful fonts (Knuth worked with Hermann Zapf in creating typefaces like AMS Euler), and precise control over layout of text on a page.
LaTeX was a later set of macros built on top of TeX that introduced "document management" capabilities like automatic numbering of equations and sections, cross-referencing, and so on. It goes by "LaTeX: a document preparation system".
One can very well imagine successors to LaTeX, alternatives that offer LaTeX's document management capabilities, and perhaps do it better -- like DocBook. (Well it's based on XML, but...) But it is hard to imagine alternatives that will replace TeX, the typesetting engine itself. TeX is probably among the programs with the least number of bugs in it -- Knuth offers $327.68 for every bug found in TeX, and has done so for a long time. A lot of thought has gone into it, with Knuth's characteristic pursuit of perfection. Every aspect of it is configurable, the code is public domain (well except for the restriction that if you make modifications you must call it by some other name -- this is because of TeX's goal that the same TeX file typeset on any machine anywhere in the world should produce an exactly identical-looking document forever into the future), and books have been written about TeX: The Program itself, and also about all the bugs that were discovered in TeX.
Some of TeX's ideas have been incorporated into Adobe's Indesign (for example), and those typesetting engines too have some innovative ideas, but TeX still remains superior. [Note: Knuth didn't intend TeX to be the standard forever, only "for the next 100 years or so" until something better comes along. For all we know, one might.]
There are TeX-based alternatives to LaTeX, such as ConTeXt and LuaTeX. It is possible that there are tasks for which they are better suited.
To answer your other objections: Although LaTeX has possibly introduced more complexity than is necessary, the TeX part of the learning is unavoidable -- if you want to create beautiful books there are some things you have to know, no matter what. And it is not hard to control position of images; TeX was designed to give you control over every point on the page, but to exercise that control you may have to go beyond the simple constructs (although I've never had to...) And if you use a good editor or macros, you won't have to type too much \begin{itemize} ... \end{itemize}; that's just a lame complaint :P
The short answer is 'No' as LaTeX is the incumbent and quite good at its job. It's also free, so there is relatively little commercial incentive to attempt to replace it. In fact, TeX is sufficiently good at technical publishing that the commercial market for technical publishing tools is rather squeezed between TeX at the 'geek' end and word at the 'great unwashed' end.
The longer answer is 'There are alternatives'. LaTeX and other packages suffer heavily from leaky abstraction issues and often require technical intervention to get what you want out of it. This puts you in the business of understanding how it works behind the scenes, which is actually fairly technical. Thus, you can only really use it for non-casual applications if you have access to someone with that level of technical skill. Writing a report or book is fine. Building a single-source technical documentation workflow with LaTeX is quite a different proposition - you will need access to someone with a technical skill base.
Alternatives to LaTeX
Commercial technical publication tools. There is really only one left standing: Framemaker. This is a mature product but somewhat stagnant. However, it does have an open document and segment interchange format called MIF, a comprehensive API and extensive support for structured documentation. It's quite widely used in aerospace circles (for example) where reference documents for aircraft run to tens of thousands of pages. Additionally, there are several also-rans in this space: Ventura Publisher, Arbortext (which is based on a TeX derived back-end IIRC), and Interleaf, which is now known as Quicksilver. Adobe claim to be implementing technical publishing functionality in InDesign but I have not really evaluated its capabilities for this.
Lout A markup language with a completely different underlying architecture to TeX. I've never worked with Lout but I believe that it is somewhat easier to work on behind the scenes than TeX.
Troff/Groff. Originally designed for technical documentation within AT&T during the 1970s (actually a spinoff of the UNIX R&D work), it's still quite widely used for this today. For quite a long time most if not all O'Reilly books were typeset using it.
DocBook. This is an XML tag based format for structure documentation, and tends to work by rendering through foreign engines. I've never used DocBook, so I can't really comment on its usage in practice.
Wordperfect. This is a venerable word processing system that is considerably better at documentation-in-the-large than MS-Word. Although viewed as something of an also-ran it retains several niche markets such as law offices and is reasonably good (at least significantly better than Word) for large, complex and heavily cross-referenced documents.
Microsoft Word. Not recommended for serious technical publication tasks due to its instability on complex documents. However, as often as not it is the only choice due to political constraints. Indexing is especially painful.
EDIT: See this Stackoverflow post for a more in-depth rundown on Framemaker and other technical documentation tools. It's an answer to a question about technical documentation tools for someone who specifically didn't want to use a markup language based system.
I have already published five books typeset in ConTeXt four of which were museum catalogues with high-quality colour illustrations. It is definitely production ready.
TeX is actually a fairly special purpose typsetting system. It does what it does well, but there isn't a large enough need for something better. "When he designed TeX, Donald Knuth did not believe that a single typesetting system would fit everyone's needs" (wikipedia)
Most of the "newer" systems build guis and extend TeX, which I believe is the right approach.
There are very good reasons for the 'issues' you are facing, so if you want to propose that it be done differently please research those reasons first.
Second, you yourself indicate that TeX is great except for a few minor quibbles. Knuth built it expressly knowing that it wouldn't be suitable for all uses and all people, but he released the source code and built an extension API so that anyone could adapt it for their needs.
You have all the tools you need to make the changes you propose, and it will be far easier to update TeX than to start from scratch, or even adapt any other system. Truly, nothing comes close to TeX. That's not to say that it's the best, but merely to drive home the point that it would be a monumental effort to implement all the good things you mention and somehow overcome the bad (although by the time you get to the bad you may better understand why it exists).
Regardless, I hope you pursue this, even as an advocate, and get others interested in it. It would be great to see take up of TeX in other fields, but that does require modification and update for ease of use and a better support of other technical entities than mathematical equations.
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TeX 和 LaTeX 设定了很高的标准； 很难想象会有什么全新的东西出现并取代它们。
我有一本 Knuth 的计算机现代字体（计算机和排版系列中的 E 册，我认为它已经完成，与 TAOCP 不同） 。 我认为没有多少人会看到这本书，而且——请允许我——它确实值得一看。 你可以看到昆斯的一些时间都花在哪里了。 这是序言中的一段话：
只是在很多地方你没有得到那种对细节的关注，这就是 TeX 经久不衰的原因。
TeX and LaTeX set the bar high; it's hard to imagine something entirely new coming along and replacing them.
I've got a copy of Knuth's Computer Modern Typefaces (Book E in the Computers And Typesetting series, which I think is completed unlike TAOCP). I don't think many people get to see this book, and - indulge me - it really is worth looking at. You can see where some of Kunth's time went. Here's a quote from the preface:
You just don't get that kind of attention to detail in many places, and that's why TeX endures.
您有 LuaTeX。
引用：“LuaTeX 是 pdfTeX 的扩展版本，使用 Lua 作为嵌入式脚本语言。LuaTeX 项目的主要目标是提供开放且可配置的 TeX 变体，同时提供向下兼容性。”
Lua 非常简单和快速，所以希望 LuaTeX 不会再那么难了......希望:)
You have LuaTeX.
Quote: "LuaTeX is an extended version of pdfTeX using Lua as an embedded scripting language. The LuaTeX projects main objective is to provide an open and configurable variant of TeX while at the same time offering downward compatibility."
Lua is very easy and fast, so hopefully LuaTeX will not be as hard anymore... hopefully :)
你不能用新的东西来保留“它有很多扩展来达到不同的目标”。 根据定义，非 TeX/LaTeX 的新内容将以无扩展名开始。
作为 GNU TeXmacs 项目的核心贡献者，该项目的目标是成为“除了 21 世纪之外的 TeX”，我觉得对LaTeX的继承有一些很好的见解。
我不知道有什么可能会取代 LaTeX。 数学界有影响力的人们太习惯使用 LaTeX，以至于不会认真考虑学习任何同样灵活的工具所需的努力。
也许 20 年后，当所有在 LaTeX 很酷的时候获得博士学位的人都退休时，就会有其他东西取代它。 希望它能像 TeXmacs 一样，但没有不必要的复杂性。
You cannot retain "it has many extensions to reach different goals" with something new. By definition something new that is not TeX/LaTeX will start with no extension.
Having been a core contributor to the GNU TeXmacs project, which aims to be something like "TeX except for the 21st century", I think have some good insight on the succession of LaTeX.
I am not aware of anything on the horizon that is any likely of dethroning LaTeX. The people of influence in the mathematical community are just too used to using LaTeX to seriously consider the effort required to learn any tool that could be equally flexible.
Maybe in 20 years, when all the folks that got their PhD when LaTeX was cool are retired will something else replace it. Hopefully, it will be something like TeXmacs, but without the unnecessary complexity.
org-mode 是一个 Emacs 扩展，能够生成 LaTeX 和 PDF 文件。 org-mode 语法与 Markdown 类似。 它只是可读。 20KB 的文档中只有几行 LaTeX 代码。 org-mode 解决了您提到的三个问题 - 您可以获得 LaTeX 的所有出色功能并摆脱其丑陋的语法。
org-mode, an Emacs extension, is able to generate LaTeX and PDF files. org-mode syntax is similar to Markdown. It's just readable. There are only several LaTeX code lines inside the 20KB document. org-mode resolves three problems you mentioned - you get all the awesome features from LaTeX and get rid of its ugly syntax.
www.patoline.org 是 TeX/LaTeX 系统的绝佳替代品。 它已经针对 Arch Linux、NixOS 进行了打包，并且可以在许多类 Unix 系统上从源代码进行编译。
www.patoline.org is a great alternative to TeX/LaTeX systems. It has already been packaged for Arch Linux, NixOS, and can be compiled from source on many Unix-like systems.
您可能还对 XeTeX 感兴趣，它是 LaTeX 的现代版本，支持 Unicode 和许多字体。 您可以使用它在一个文档中直接输入日语、阿拉伯语等。 （这并没有解决您给出的缺点，但它仍然与有关 LaTeX 的缺点和替代系统的讨论相关！）
You might also be interested in XeTeX, which is a modern version of LaTeX in that it supports Unicode and many fonts. You can use it to directly input Japanese, Arabic etc. in one document. (This doesn't address the disadvantages that you gave, but it's still relevant to the discussion about LaTeX' shortcomings and alternative systems! )
梦想工具不是 TEX
TEX 不太好用。 Tex 可能（我不是打印方面的专家）很好地提供了一个将文档与打印细节和复杂性分离的层。
概念线是这样的：
数学家不是秘书，他主要关心的是他想展示什么，而不是如何展示。
因此，在 Latex 之上还需要一层抽象。
总体目标：
因此，需要（一个梦想）一种工具，它可以更接近我们用手所做的事情，当然比用手做的更快（事实上，我曾经看到一个以 .pdf 格式扫描的书面答案，捕获了当场的答案） Latex 的主要作者没有使用它！）。
Dream Tool 规格：（粗略了解一下）
S1。 学习曲线的初始时间大约为一个小时。
S2。 即使累了也可以快速编写文档（通过简单的类比）。
S3。 可以剪切和粘贴所见公式。
S4。 比手工更正文档更快（2 分钟而不是手工 5 分钟）。
当今最佳工具能力：
S1。 差不多。
S2。 一边想着别的事情一边是不可能的。
S3。 剪切并粘贴公式描述（实现）。
S4。 手工需要 20 分钟，而不是 5 分钟（一切都是具体的，你必须来回解读）。
另一个迟缓的例子：让一个写了一份包含 10 个范畴论图表的 Latex 文档的人以倾斜的方式画出所有的平方，这当然不是一个快速的工作。
THE DREAM TOOL IS NOT TEX
TEX is not great to work with. Tex is probably (I am not an expert in printing matters) good to provide a layer decoupling document from printing niceties and complexities.
The conceptual line is this :
A mathematician is not a secretary, his main concern is WHAT he wants to show, not HOW to show it.
So one more layer of abstraction is needed above that of Latex.
General goal :
Hence there is a need (a dream) for a tool that allows to be much closer to what we can do by hand and of course faster than by hand (in fact I once saw a written answer scanned in .pdf catching red-handed one of the main author of Latex in not using it!).
Dream Tool specifications : (rough one to get the idea)
S1. About an hour of initial time in the learning curve.
S2. Allow to write a document quickly (by simple analogy) even when tired.
S3. Cut and paste of seen formula available.
S4. To correct a document faster than by hand (2 minutes instead of 5 by hand).
Today best tools abilities :
S1. About the same.
S2. Impossible while thinking about something else.
S3. Cut and paste of formula description (implementation).
S4. It take 20 minutes instead of 5 by hand (everything is specific you have to decipher back and forth).
Another example of sluggishness : Ask someone who wrote a latex document with 10 diagrams in category theory to draw all the squared ones in a slanted way, certainly not a quick job.
TeX 不是一个通用的排版系统：它的核心能力在于排版包含大量数学的长文本。 由于它没有任何竞争，我可以想象几个原因：
虽然您引用的缺点是真实的，但寻找一个基于 TeX 构建的像样的编辑器/GUI shell 比用其他语言排版要容易得多，其中有很多。 如果您热衷于数学，并且希望您的文章保存数十年，那就是。 对于通用排版，您提到的程序很可能是更好的选择。
TeX is not a general purpose typesetting system: its core proficiency is in typesetting long texts with lots of math. In that it doesn't have any competition, I can imagine several reasons:
While the drawbacks you quoted are real, it's much easier to look around for a decent editor/GUI shell built on top of TeX, of which are many, than to typeset in a different language. If you're into math, and want your articles to be preserved for decades, that is. For the general purpose typesetting, again, the programs you mentioned could well be a better choice.
这么长时间了，没有人说出非常重要的事情。
LaTeX 文本以文本文件形式编写，可用于文学编程，这是 Don Knuth 提出的一种编写文档良好的程序的风格。 这个想法是解释该程序是如何以类似于数学文本的方式开发的。 代码片段就像数学文本中的公式一样呈现。
这是一个好主意，一段时间后，您可以阅读该程序是如何构思的，并且可以修改解释为什么以相同方式做出决定的部分。
另一个优点是您可以生成 LaTeX 代码作为程序的输出，这样您就可以发布精美排版的结果，或者使用 gnuplot 等程序生成图形，然后为图形生成 LaTeX 代码并将其插入到您的文本中，这很好，因为与导出到某些图像格式的图形相比，生成的文件非常轻，将其包含在
\includegraphics中，或者如果您通过粘贴使用某些文字处理器，则情况更糟。LaTeX 并不难学，只要按照你的节奏，从简单的文档开始使用你需要的东西即可。 当您学习进步时，您将需要学习新功能和软件包。 如果你试图通过学习所有软件包来掌握 LaTeX，只是为了成为一名 LaTeX 专家，那么你就是在浪费时间，软件包数量巨大，但你不需要全部学习。 尝试从“不太简短的 LaTeX 简介” lshort.pdf 或“A Gentle Guide to TeX”gentle.pdf 等指南开始。
如果您厌倦了输入长宏，请学习为您经常使用的宏编写自己的宏，指南中有一节介绍了这一点。
在哪里可以找到信息，在 ctan.org、tug.org，不要在 Latex.com 中搜索该域名代表橡胶材料。
有一个 TeX/LaTeX 目录，在 ctan.org 中搜索它，当您需要特殊功能时，它非常有帮助。 你可以在这里找到它 http://texcatalogue.sarovar.org/index.html，但是你如果此链接已过时，可以搜索 texcatalogue。
结束我的评论，LaTeX 和其他软件的一个很大的优点是不经常更改版本，TeX/LaTeX 是一个非常完整的排版系统，如果您需要不存在的东西，您可以添加（和共享）更多功能。
学习LaTeX是一项很好的时间投资，你只需要学习一次，然后就可以全身心投入到你的工作中，而不是学习新版本。
PS
我忘了说，可以编写程序将 LaTeX 翻译为其他标记语言（以及文字处理器格式，如果有文档记录），反之亦然。 事实上，有几个程序给出了可接受的结果，虽然据我所知还没有一个程序可以翻译任何 LaTeX 代码，但是对于更常见的文本，您可以找到几个程序将它们翻译为 HTML，LibreOffice 可以导出一个单词处理器文档转换为 LaTeX，尽管它不是很有用，因为很少有文字处理器用户使用标签将段落标记为标题、引文等。绝大多数标记文本以更改字体、大小、对齐方式等，这是翻译的进入乳胶。
但是，当您与使用 word 或 LibreOffice 的人协作时，您可能需要这样做，并且您必须将其与您的 LaTeX 文本集成，毕竟只需要求他们使用正确的标记或将其导出为文本并手动插入所需的宏即可你必须审阅你的合作者的全文。
曾经需要将其转换为 HTML 以便在网上发布或制作便携式演示文稿，但现在带宽允许快速传输 PDF 文件，并且像 Beamer 这样的软件包允许人们编写非常漂亮的演示文稿。
TeX/LaTeX 的优点在于可以在其上编写的包的大小以及共享它们的意愿。 感谢 Knuth 的伟大想法，我们仍在等待他的全套《计算编程艺术》。
After all this time, nobody told something very important.
LaTeX texts are written in a text file, it can be used for Literate programming, an style proposed by Don Knuth to write very well documented programs. The idea is to explain how the program was developed in a way similar to math text. Pieces of code are presented like the formulas, in mathematical texts.
This is a great idea, after some time you can read how the program was conceived and you can modify the parts explaining why the decision was taken in the same way.
Other advantage is that you can generate LaTeX code as an output of your programs, in this way you can publish your results beautifully typeset, or use programs like gnuplot to generate graphs then generate LaTeX code for the graph and insert it in your text, that is great because the resulting file is very light compared to graphs exported to some image format, to include it with
\includegraphicsor worse if you are using some word processor by pasting it.LaTeX is not really hard to learn, just take your pace, use what you need starting with simple documents. When you advance in your studies you will need to learn new features and packages. If you try to master LaTeX by learning all the packages just to become a LaTeX expert, you are wasting your time, there is a huge amount of packages, but you don't need to learn them all. Try to start with guides like "the not so short introduction to LaTeX" lshort.pdf, or "A Gentle Introduction to TeX" gentle.pdf.
If you are tired of typing long macros, learn to write your own for the pieces you use more, the guides have a section about that.
Where to find information, in ctan.org, tug.org, do not search in latex.com that domain stands for the rubber material.
There is a TeX/LaTeX Catalog, search it in ctan.org it is very helpful when you need an special feature. You can find it here http://texcatalogue.sarovar.org/index.html, but you can search texcatalogue if this link becomes outdated.
To finish my comment, there is a great advantage that LaTeX and other software do not change of versions frequently, TeX/LaTeX is a very complete system for typesetting, you can add (and share) more features if you need something that does not exist.
Learning LaTeX is a good time investment, you just need to learn it once, then dedicate to do you work, not to learn the new version.
P.S.
I forgot to say that it is possible to write programs to translate LaTeX to other markup languages, (and word processors formats if documented) and vice versa. In deed there are several that give acceptable results, although as far as I know there is not yet a program that translates any LaTeX code, but for the more common texts you can find several programs to translate them to HTML, LibreOffice can export a word processor document to LaTeX, although it is not very useful because few word processor users use the tags to mark paragraphs as headers, quotations, etc. the vast majority mark the text to change the font, size, alignment, etc. and this is translated into LaTeX.
But you may need to do this when collaborating with people that use word or LibreOffice, and you have to integrate it with you LaTeX text, just ask them to use the right markings or export it as text and insert the needed macros manually, after all you have to review the whole text of your collaborator.
Once there was need to translate it to HTML to publish on the net or make portable presentations, but now the bandwidth allows to transmit PDF files fast, and packages like beamer allows one to write very nice presentations.
The advantages of TeX/LaTeX are of the size of the packages that can be written on it an the will to share them. Thanks to Knuth for his great ideas, we are still waiting the full set of his Art of Computing Programming.
我认为 docbook 应该是 LateX 的基于开放 xml 的替代品。
“DocBook 提供了一个使用 SGML 或 XML 编写结构化文档的系统。它特别适合有关计算机硬件和软件的书籍和论文，但绝不限于它们。
”简而言之，DocBook 是一个易于使用的系统。 -理解并广泛使用DTD。 全球有数十家组织使用 DocBook 来处理数百万页的各种印刷和在线格式的文档。”
-- 来自 文档书籍常见问题解答
I think docbook is supposed to be an open xml based replacement for LateX.
"DocBook provides a system for writing structured documents using SGML or XML. It is particularly well-suited to books and papers about computer hardware and software, though it is by no means limited to them.
"In short, DocBook is an easy-to-understand and widely used DTD. Dozens of organizations use DocBook for millions of pages of documentation, in various print and online formats, worldwide."
-- From the doc book faq
这并没有真正消除 LaTeX 的主要缺点，但没关系:) 关于你的观点
这完全是设计使然。 在简洁（并且更容易打字）和易于理解（并且打字时间更长）之间需要权衡。 较长的名称也会减少冲突，因为 TeX 和 LaTeX 不支持名称空间（不幸的是）。
不管怎样，一个好的编辑会避免上述抱怨。 不用编写了。
设置键绑定或制表符补全或任何您喜欢的东西，您再也
That doesn't really cut into the main disadvantages of LaTeX, but no matter :) Regarding your point
this is entirely by design. There is a tradeoff between terse (and easier to type) and understandable (and longer to type). Longer names also have fewer collisions, since TeX and LaTeX don't support namespaces (unfortunately).
Anyway, a good editor will obviate the complaint above. Set up key-bindings or tab-completions or whatever else takes your fancy and you never have to write
ever again.
除了图形难以定位的问题之外，您对 LaTeX 的其他批评更多地与它的 UI 或缺乏 UI 有关。
如果您想使用 LaTeX 生成文档，但想要一种更简单的方法来使用它，那么您应该看看 LyX。 它是 LaTeX 的 GUI 前端，可以解决您的几个问题：它使 LaTeX 更容易学习（事实上，您甚至不必了解 LaTeX 来创建简单的、无数学的文档），它更直观，并且节省你打字。 它还添加了拼写检查、更好的图形处理、导航等。
因为 LyX 只是 LaTeX 的前端，所以您仍然可以获得精美呈现的文档。 LyX 文档也是纯文本，因此版本控制效果很好。 事实上，LyX 内置了对 subversion 的支持。
如果您还没有猜到，我衷心推荐 LyX。 我用它写了整个博士论文，并发现它非常值得。
Apart from the issue of graphics being hard to position, your other criticisms of LaTeX are more to do with its UI or lack thereof.
If you want to use LaTeX to produce your documents but want an easier way to use it then you should really check out LyX. It's a GUI front-end to LaTeX and address several of your issues: it makes LaTeX easier to learn (in fact, you don't have to even know LaTeX to create a simple, mathless document), it's more intuitive, and it saves you typing. It also adds spell-checking, better graphics handling, navigation, and more.
Because LyX is merely a front-end to LaTeX you still get beautifully presented documents. LyX documents are also plain text so version control works well. In fact, LyX has support for subversion built-in.
If you haven't already guessed, I heartily recommend LyX. I wrote my entire PhD thesis using it and found it very worthwhile.
你的四个缺点可以概括为“太难了”“太难了”“太难了”最后“太难了”。 我认为解决方案是学习如何正确使用该系统。
任何为新手设计的系统都会在其他方面表现出缺陷，失去控制或失去灵活性。 如果您希望更轻松地放置图像，请尝试 MS Word。 如果不努力学习该程序，就无法解决简单性问题。 TeX 支持定义宏，因此如果您愿意，您可以将 \begin{itemize} 标记更改为更容易接受的内容，例如 \bi。 一旦您充分了解了 LaTex 世界的特点，它就和普通打字一样快了。
我曾经在数学课上练习用 TeX 书写笔记，因为用 \sum_{n=1}^i 书写比在 MS Word 中查找符号要快。
Your four disadvantages can be summarized as "It's too hard", "It's too hard", "It's too hard" and finally, "It's too hard". I think the solution then is to learn how to use the system properly.
Any system that is designed for a novice will show deficiencies in other ways, loss of control or loss of flexibility. Try MS Word if you want it to be easier to place images. There's no way around simplicity without effort of learning the program. TeX supports definition macros, so you can change that \begin{itemize} tag into something more palatable like \bi if you so choose. Once you have sufficiently learned your nook of the LaTex world, it's just as fast as regular typing.
I used to practice taking notes in a math class by writing in TeX, because it was faster to write in \sum_{n=1}^i than trying to find the symbols in MS Word.
您可能想查看维基百科的类别排版编程语言和免费排版软件。 Lout 听起来特别好。
You may want to check out Wikipedia's categories Typesetting programming languages and Free typesetting software. Lout in particular sounds nice.
并不是真正的后继者，但您可能想看看 *roff (groff, troff, nroff)。 我对此了解不多，但我记得它的格式很简洁。 它是用于手册页的工具。 由于我只是顺便听说过，所以我无法为您提供更多帮助。
例如：
Not really a successor, but you may want to look at *roff (groff, troff, nroff). I don't know much about it but I remember its format being terse. It is the tool used for man pages. Since I have only ever heard of it in passing, I can't give you any more help with it.
For example:
XSL-FO 可能适合您的需求。 虽然它不如 TeX 强大，但它确实可以很好地处理 DocBook 等 XML 格式。 流行的开源实现是 Apache FOP： http://xmlgraphics.apache.org/fop/ 。
如果您需要对版式进行非常精细的控制，那么最好使用 TeX 或 FrameMaker 或 InDesign* 等专有工具。
*注意：InDesign 目前对 XML 支持较弱（IMO）
XSL-FO might suit your needs. While it's not nearly as powerful as TeX, it does play well with XML formats like DocBook. A popular open source implementation is Apache FOP: http://xmlgraphics.apache.org/fop/.
If you need very fine control over typography, you're better off with TeX or a proprietary tool like FrameMaker or InDesign*.
*beware: InDesign currently has weak XML support IMO
我刚刚偶然发现 AsciiDoc 它看起来像一种简单的文本标记语言（ala markdown，textile），但它的功能要强大得多。 它大致相当于 DocBook，因此它可以发出 html、pdf，甚至 docbook xml 进行进一步处理。
I just stumbled upon AsciiDoc which looks like a simple text markup language (á la markdown, textile), but it's a lot more powerful. It's roughly equivalent with DocBook, so it can emit html, pdf, or even docbook xml for further processing.
我只是浏览了一下，但 Emacs Muse http://mwolson.org/projects/EmacsMuse.html< /a> 可能会很有趣（如果有人对此有更多经验，我很感兴趣。我喜欢生成多个后端、latex、texinfo 或其他东西的想法。）
I have only skimmed through it, but Emacs Muse http://mwolson.org/projects/EmacsMuse.html might be interesting (I'm interested if any one has more experienced with it. I like the idea of generating to several backends, latex, texinfo or stuff.)
从技术上讲，Sphinx 并不是 LaTex 的替代品，而是让您的生活更轻松的东西，并且（如果需要）会生成为您输出 PDF（通过 LaTex）、HTML 或纯文本。
它主要面向代码文档，但由于它使用 reStructuredText，人们发现它更容易使用用于其他目的，包括写书。
Technically speaking Sphinx is not a replacement of LaTex but something that will make your life easier and that (if desired) generates PDF (via LaTex), HTML or plain text output for you.
It's mostly geared towards code documentation but due to it using reStructuredText, people have found it easier to work with for other purposes, including writing books.
也许您已经注意到 TeX 的奇怪版本号。 当 TeX 达到版本 3 时，Knuth 不希望 TeX 像大多数软件那样进一步发展到新版本。 相反，他希望它能够收敛到最终的、无错误的 TeX。 因此版本号现在向数学数字 pi 收敛。 版本 3 之后是版本 3.1，然后是 3.14，当前版本是 3.1415926。
以类似的方式，Metafont 有一个向数学数字 e 收敛的版本（当前为 2.718281）。
基于此，你的问题的答案是 Knuth 不希望 TeX 演变成 TeX 版本 4。
Perhaps you have noticed the weird version numbers of TeX. When TeX reached version 3 Knuth didn't want TeX to evolve further into new versions like most software does. Instead he wanted it to converge to a final and bug-free TeX. Hence the version number now converges towards the mathematical number pi. After version 3 followed version 3.1, then 3.14 and the current version is 3.1415926.
In a similar fashion Metafont has a version that converges towards the mathematical number e (currently 2.718281).
Based on this, the answer to your question is that Knuth doesn't want TeX to evolve into TeX version 4.
用于特定工作的工具：
Latex2e 的优势在于它是一个标准的文档准备和编辑工具。 有利于文章和书籍的表示的表示语言。 然而，它对于排版来说并不是很好。 这并不是一件坏事：过早的格式化是所有排版邪恶的根源：大多数出版商只是在文案编辑过程开始时就抛弃了作者格式。
上下文超级适合排版； 它们无法与 Latex 作为文档表示语言竞争，因为它并没有真正解决文档准备/编辑阶段应该解决的任何问题，因此任何人都没有理由改变成熟的 Latex。
与其通过 Latex3 的努力来修复 Latex2e 对发布不重要的缺陷，我宁愿看到努力开发以下工作流程：
后记
Tools for particular jobs:
The strength of Latex2e is that it is a standard document preparation & representation language that is good for the representation of articles and books. It is, however, not really great for typesetting. This is not a bad thing: premature formatting is the root of all typesetting evil: most publishers simply throw away author formatting at the beginning of the copy-editing process.
Context is super for typesetting; they cannot compete with Latex as a document representation language, because it does not really solve any problems that should be solved at the document preparation/editing stage, so there is no reason for anyone to change from the well-established latex.
Rather than fix the unimportant-to-publishing flaws of Latex2e through the Latex3 effort, I would rather see effort put into developing the following workflow:
Postscripts
有一个 LaTeX3 项目基本上一直在进行。 从这个意义上来说，它是当前 LaTeX2e 的继承者。
您忘记/忽略了 TeX 创建时的主要目标——“TeX 是一种新的排版系统，旨在创建精美的书籍”。 TeX 的目标是排版，它的主要关注点是“将段落分成行”（Donald E. Knuth 和 Michael F. Plass，软件 - 实践和经验，第 11 卷，第 1119-1184 页） ，1981）、连字、字距调整、漂亮的字体（Knuth 与 Hermann Zapf 合作创建 AMS Euler 等字体）以及对页面上文本布局的精确控制。
LaTeX 是后来在 TeX 之上构建的一组宏，引入了“文档管理”功能，例如方程和节的自动编号、交叉引用等。 它的名称是“LaTeX：文档准备系统”。
人们可以很好地想象 LaTeX 的后继者，即提供 LaTeX 文档管理功能的替代品，并且可能做得更好——比如 DocBook。 （嗯，它是基于 XML 的，但是……）但是很难想象有什么替代方案可以取代 TeX（排版引擎本身）。 TeX 可能是 bug 数量最少的程序之一 —— Knuth 为 TeX 中发现的每个 bug 提供 327.68 美元，并且长期以来一直这样做。 高德纳 (Knuth) 的独特追求完美，倾注了很多心思。 它的每个方面都是可配置的，代码是公共领域的（当然除了这样的限制：如果你进行修改，你必须用其他名称来调用它——这是因为 TeX 的目标是在任何地方的任何机器上排版相同的 TeX 文件。世界应该永远生成一个外观完全相同的文档），并且已经写了一些关于 TeX：程序本身以及在 TeX 中发现的所有错误的书籍。
TeX 的一些想法已经被纳入 Adobe 的 Indesign（例如）中，那些排版引擎也有一些创新的想法，但 TeX 仍然保持优越性。 [注：Knuth 并不打算让 TeX 永远成为标准，只是“在接下来的 100 年左右”直到出现更好的东西为止。 据我们所知，人们可能会这样做。]
有一些基于 TeX 的 LaTeX 替代品，例如 ConTeXt 和 LuaTeX。 可能有他们更适合的任务。
回答您的其他反对意见：虽然 LaTeX 可能引入了不必要的复杂性，但学习的 TeX 部分是不可避免的——如果您想创作精美的书籍，那么您必须知道一些事情，无论。 而且控制图像的位置并不难； TeX 旨在让您控制页面上的每个点，但要练习这一点控制你可能必须超越简单的构造（尽管我从来没有......）并且如果你使用好的编辑器或宏，你将不必输入太多 \begin{itemize} ... \结束{逐项列出}; 这只是一个蹩脚的抱怨：P
There is a LaTeX3 project that has been going on for basically forever. In that sense, it is a successor to the current LaTeX2e.
You forget/ignore the primary goal for TeX when it was created -- "TeX is a new typesetting system intended for the creation of beautiful books". The goal of TeX was typesetting, and its primary concerns were things like "Breaking Paragraphs Into Lines" (Donald E. Knuth and Michael F. Plass, Software--Practice and Experience, Vol. 11, pp. 1119-1184, 1981), ligatures, kerning, beautiful fonts (Knuth worked with Hermann Zapf in creating typefaces like AMS Euler), and precise control over layout of text on a page.
LaTeX was a later set of macros built on top of TeX that introduced "document management" capabilities like automatic numbering of equations and sections, cross-referencing, and so on. It goes by "LaTeX: a document preparation system".
One can very well imagine successors to LaTeX, alternatives that offer LaTeX's document management capabilities, and perhaps do it better -- like DocBook. (Well it's based on XML, but...) But it is hard to imagine alternatives that will replace TeX, the typesetting engine itself. TeX is probably among the programs with the least number of bugs in it -- Knuth offers $327.68 for every bug found in TeX, and has done so for a long time. A lot of thought has gone into it, with Knuth's characteristic pursuit of perfection. Every aspect of it is configurable, the code is public domain (well except for the restriction that if you make modifications you must call it by some other name -- this is because of TeX's goal that the same TeX file typeset on any machine anywhere in the world should produce an exactly identical-looking document forever into the future), and books have been written about TeX: The Program itself, and also about all the bugs that were discovered in TeX.
Some of TeX's ideas have been incorporated into Adobe's Indesign (for example), and those typesetting engines too have some innovative ideas, but TeX still remains superior. [Note: Knuth didn't intend TeX to be the standard forever, only "for the next 100 years or so" until something better comes along. For all we know, one might.]
There are TeX-based alternatives to LaTeX, such as ConTeXt and LuaTeX. It is possible that there are tasks for which they are better suited.
To answer your other objections: Although LaTeX has possibly introduced more complexity than is necessary, the TeX part of the learning is unavoidable -- if you want to create beautiful books there are some things you have to know, no matter what. And it is not hard to control position of images; TeX was designed to give you control over every point on the page, but to exercise that control you may have to go beyond the simple constructs (although I've never had to...) And if you use a good editor or macros, you won't have to type too much \begin{itemize} ... \end{itemize}; that's just a lame complaint :P
简短的回答是“不”，因为 LaTeX 是现有的并且非常擅长它的工作。 它也是免费的，因此尝试取代它的商业动机相对较少。 事实上，TeX 在技术出版方面足够出色，以至于技术出版工具的商业市场在“极客”端的 TeX 和“未洗过的”端的 Word 之间受到挤压。
更长的答案是“还有其他选择”。 LaTeX 和其他软件包深受抽象泄漏问题的困扰，并且通常需要技术干预才能得到什么你想摆脱它。 这让您了解它在幕后是如何工作的，这实际上是相当技术性的。 因此，只有当您能够接触到具有该级别技术技能的人员时，您才能真正将其用于非休闲应用程序。 写一份报告或一本书都可以。 使用 LaTeX 构建单一源技术文档工作流程是一个完全不同的主张 - 您将需要接触具有技术技能基础的人员。
LaTeX 的替代品
商业技术出版物
工具。 确实只有一个
左站立：Framemaker。
这是一个成熟的产品，但
有点停滞。 然而，它确实
有一个打开的文档和片段
称为 MIF 的交换格式，
全面的 API 和广泛的
支持结构化
文档。 是相当广泛的
用于航空航天领域（用于
示例）其中参考文档
对于飞机运行到数十
数千页。 此外，
有
这个领域的几个失败者：
Ventura 出版商，
Arbortext（基于
TeX 派生的后端 IIRC），以及
Interleaf，现已已知
作为快银。
Adobe声明即将实施
技术发布功能
InDesign 但我还没有真正
评估了其这方面的能力。
Lout 一种带有
完全不同的底层
架构到 TeX。 我从来没有
与 Lout 合作过，但我相信
工作起来比较容易
Troff/Groff。最初设计用于 AT&T 内的技术文档在 20 世纪 70 年代（实际上是 UNIX 研发工作的衍生品），它至今仍被广泛使用。 在相当长的一段时间里，大多数（如果不是全部）O'Reilly 书籍都是使用它来排版的。
DocBook。 这是一个 XML 标签
结构的基础格式
文档，并且往往通过以下方式工作
通过国外引擎渲染。
我从未使用过 DocBook，所以我不能
真正评论它的用法
练习。
Wordperfect。 这是一个
古老的文字处理系统
那是相当擅长
文档比 MS-Word 还要大。
虽然被视为某种
落选者它保留了几个利基市场
律师事务所等市场
相当好（至少显着
对于大型、复杂的情况，优于 Word）
以及大量交叉引用的文档。
Microsoft Word。 不是
推荐用于严肃的技术
由于其出版任务
复杂文档的不稳定。
然而，通常情况下，
出于政治原因的唯一选择
限制。 索引尤其是
痛苦。
编辑：请参阅这篇 Stackoverflow 帖子 更深入地介绍了 Framemaker 和其他技术文档工具。 对于那些特别不想使用基于标记语言的系统的人来说，这是对有关技术文档工具的问题的回答。
The short answer is 'No' as LaTeX is the incumbent and quite good at its job. It's also free, so there is relatively little commercial incentive to attempt to replace it. In fact, TeX is sufficiently good at technical publishing that the commercial market for technical publishing tools is rather squeezed between TeX at the 'geek' end and word at the 'great unwashed' end.
The longer answer is 'There are alternatives'. LaTeX and other packages suffer heavily from leaky abstraction issues and often require technical intervention to get what you want out of it. This puts you in the business of understanding how it works behind the scenes, which is actually fairly technical. Thus, you can only really use it for non-casual applications if you have access to someone with that level of technical skill. Writing a report or book is fine. Building a single-source technical documentation workflow with LaTeX is quite a different proposition - you will need access to someone with a technical skill base.
Alternatives to LaTeX
Commercial technical publication
tools. There is really only one
left standing: Framemaker.
This is a mature product but
somewhat stagnant. However, it does
have an open document and segment
interchange format called MIF,
a comprehensive API and extensive
support for structured
documentation. It's quite widely
used in aerospace circles (for
example) where reference documents
for aircraft run to tens of
thousands of pages. Additionally,
there are
several also-rans in this space:
Ventura Publisher,
Arbortext (which is based on a
TeX derived back-end IIRC), and
Interleaf, which is now known
as Quicksilver.
Adobe claim to be implementing
technical publishing functionality in
InDesign but I have not really
evaluated its capabilities for this.
Lout A markup language with a
completely different underlying
architecture to TeX. I've never
worked with Lout but I believe that
it is somewhat easier to work on
behind the scenes than TeX.
Troff/Groff. Originally designed for technical documentation within AT&T during the 1970s (actually a spinoff of the UNIX R&D work), it's still quite widely used for this today. For quite a long time most if not all O'Reilly books were typeset using it.
DocBook. This is an XML tag
based format for structure
documentation, and tends to work by
rendering through foreign engines.
I've never used DocBook, so I can't
really comment on its usage in
practice.
Wordperfect. This is a
venerable word processing system
that is considerably better at
documentation-in-the-large than MS-Word.
Although viewed as something of an
also-ran it retains several niche
markets such as law offices and is
reasonably good (at least significantly
better than Word) for large, complex
and heavily cross-referenced documents.
Microsoft Word. Not
recommended for serious technical
publication tasks due to its
instability on complex documents.
However, as often as not it is the
only choice due to political
constraints. Indexing is especially
painful.
EDIT: See this Stackoverflow post for a more in-depth rundown on Framemaker and other technical documentation tools. It's an answer to a question about technical documentation tools for someone who specifically didn't want to use a markup language based system.
您看过ConTeXt吗？ 它是一组 TeX 宏，可以用来代替 LaTeX。
我自己没有使用过它，但示例文档中的语法在很多情况下看起来比 LaTeX 更简单。
Have you had a look at ConTeXt? It's a set of macros for TeX that can be used instead of LaTeX.
I haven't used it myself but the syntax in the example documents looks simpler than LaTeX in a number of cases.
我已经出版了五本用 ConTeXt 排版的书，其中四本是带有高质量彩色插图的博物馆目录。 它绝对是生产就绪的。
I have already published five books typeset in ConTeXt four of which were museum catalogues with high-quality colour illustrations. It is definitely production ready.
TeX 实际上是一个相当特殊用途的排版系统。 它做了它擅长的事情，但没有足够大的需求来提供更好的东西。 “当 Donald Knuth 设计 TeX 时，他并不相信单一的排版系统能够满足每个人的需求”（wikipedia )
大多数“较新”的系统都会构建 guis 并扩展 TeX，我认为这是正确的方法。
您所面临的“问题”是有充分理由的，因此，如果您想建议以不同的方式进行处理，请首先研究这些原因。
其次，您自己指出 TeX 很棒，除了一些小问题之外。 Knuth 明确指出它不会适合所有用途和所有人，但他发布了源代码并构建了扩展 API，以便任何人都可以根据自己的需求进行调整。
您拥有进行所建议的更改所需的所有工具，并且更新 TeX 比从头开始甚至适应任何其他系统要容易得多。 确实，没有什么能与 TeX 相媲美。 这并不是说它是最好的，而只是为了说明这一点：实现你提到的所有好的事情并以某种方式克服坏的事情将是一项巨大的努力（尽管当你遇到坏的事情时，你可能会更好地理解）为什么它存在）。
无论如何，我希望您能够追求这一点，即使是作为倡导者，并让其他人对此感兴趣。 很高兴看到 TeX 在其他领域得到采用，但这确实需要修改和更新，以便于使用以及比数学方程更好地支持其他技术实体。
-亚当
TeX is actually a fairly special purpose typsetting system. It does what it does well, but there isn't a large enough need for something better. "When he designed TeX, Donald Knuth did not believe that a single typesetting system would fit everyone's needs" (wikipedia)
Most of the "newer" systems build guis and extend TeX, which I believe is the right approach.
There are very good reasons for the 'issues' you are facing, so if you want to propose that it be done differently please research those reasons first.
Second, you yourself indicate that TeX is great except for a few minor quibbles. Knuth built it expressly knowing that it wouldn't be suitable for all uses and all people, but he released the source code and built an extension API so that anyone could adapt it for their needs.
You have all the tools you need to make the changes you propose, and it will be far easier to update TeX than to start from scratch, or even adapt any other system. Truly, nothing comes close to TeX. That's not to say that it's the best, but merely to drive home the point that it would be a monumental effort to implement all the good things you mention and somehow overcome the bad (although by the time you get to the bad you may better understand why it exists).
Regardless, I hope you pursue this, even as an advocate, and get others interested in it. It would be great to see take up of TeX in other fields, but that does require modification and update for ease of use and a better support of other technical entities than mathematical equations.
-Adam