Are there any professional alternatives to TeX/LaTeX which produce equal or even better typesetting? Maybe expensive commercial ones. The software counts if it is comparable or superior to LaTeX (with microtype) in typesetting text or math (or both). In any case, please mention both aspects in your answer.
I am only aware of ConTeXt (which is partly based on TeX).
Note that I am not looking for an alternative for my personal use, I am just asking out of curiosity.
You asked for professional solutions. Several top technical journals, including I believe Physical Review Letters and Nature magazine, use Advanced Print Publisher (APP), also known as Advent 3B2. Formerly available from Arbortext but now from PTC.
It can definitely handle mathematics, and I'm sure it deals with typographic details such as ligatures and microtype-like tweaks. I believe the main strength over tex is that it makes complete document production very automated. Things like dealing with floats (tables and figures) in a more-automatic way than tex, and giving manual controls to override it.
I haven't used it, however. (standard desktop version starts at US$5000-10000 as of January 2015). The wikipedia page has a little information.
I truly believe nothing comes close to TeX (and Friends, e.g. LaTeX, ConTeXt) when it comes to output quality.
Other DTP programs such as Indesign (Adobe), QuarkXPress (Quark) or Scribus (open source) offer a graphical interface and hence an easier learning curve, but they don't match up in terms of quality. Amongst many, let me just point the two most obvious quality advantages of TeX:
Typesetting maths correctly is very complex (symbols need to adjust in size, spaces are very specific, etc.), and only TeX gets it right. There are probably even better examples, but try obtaining something like the following in InDesign:
Tex's algorithm is very complex and takes into account possible hyphens, widows, orphans, etc. to produce an output that is more elegant.
The best showcase of this I have found is a comparison posted by Roel Zinkstok of Zink Typography, reproduced below. On the comparison, Roel indicated with red dots lines with inter-word spacing that is out of proportion, a cardinal sin for typography, while the red circles indicate hyphens, which should be minimized:
pdfTeX output was made without the help of the microtype package.
microtype but rather by allowing spaces to stretch and shrink much more than tex would normally permit (being as fussy as it is on this point).
A shameless plug: We are offering a professional typesetter (though open source) which is based on LuaTeX. If it is "equal or even better" than LaTeX is surely subjective.
Our focus is to bring the DTP world to automatic typesetting (database publishing). For example we have
While TeX / LaTeX is focused on text documents (with or without math) our main application area is product catalogs, price lists and other documents that are created automatically from databases but have flexible and nice layouts.
I'd like to invite everyone to try out or perhaps work on the software. Development never ends (as usual).
\baselineskip of the text font. Every object is placed in the grid (and thus integer multiple of \baselineskip from the top). There is still much to do but I will for example include an invisible "adjust to grid" marker that goes to the next cell. This part is currently under development.
Troff should definitely be mentioned for its simplicity. I normally use LaTeX for all my documents, but for some special cases (e.g. user manuals) troff (or its GNU version groff) is just the simpler way. It can also handle math using the preprocessing tool eqn. A nice comparison between troff and LaTeX can be found here.
groff which the author claims makes it comparable to LaTeX. I think I just found something to do for the weekend :)
LaTeX for good looking automatically generated documents.
Commented
Jun 21, 2013 at 8:26
troff can trace its origins back to a text formatting program called RUNOFF . see RUNOFF en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RUNOFF RUNOFF was the first computer text formatting program to see significant use.
ditroff to typeset my thesis. And I believe groff has taken over some of $\TeX$ line-handling and math formatting techniques, so it should be comparable for text at least. But overall a troff document feels like assembler to $\LaTeX$' more structured approach. Lerned $'LaTeX$, and never looked back.
GNU TeXMacs is a WYSIWYG scientific structured document editor and typesetter. It used to require a TeX distribution but now it does not.
Here is a list of not so widely known typesetting systems that I found googling around, mostly work-in-progress (or work-used-to-be-in-progress):
cl-typesetting is written in Common Lisp, which implies that its markup language is also Common Lisp. (Macro language, anyone?)
The Z format looks like HTML, but is not.
Platypus commands look like [list|bullet:{rarrow}]
. Written in Java.
Patoline, written in OCaml. Also handles SQL bibliography databases, and comes with Bibi, a bibfile to SQL converter written in Haskell. (The developers seem to be really keen on functional languages.) You have to build it from source. Commands look like a mixture of TeX, OCaml and new markup:
(* #FORMAT FormatArticle *)
\begin{genumerate}(AlphaLower, fun s -> [tT (s^". ")])
\item First item
\item Second item
\end{genumerate}
\includeGraphics("pato.png")
$$ a + b $$
$ a + b $
\Caml(
let dr ()=
[bB (fun _->
[Drawing (drawing [Path (default,[rectangle (0.,0.) (10.,10.)])])]
)]
)
Note that I have no idea if this code works, I just copied together parts of the manual.
SILE (Simon's Improved Layout Engine) is written in Lua and uses the Harfbuzz shaping engine. It can typeset any XML input but also provides an input syntax similar to that of LaTeX:
\begin[class=book,papersize=129mm x 198mm]{document}
\include[src=examples/macros.sil]
\script[src=packages/grid]
\left-running-head{A Scandal in Bohemia}
\right-running-head{\hfill{}Alexander Conan Doyle}
\headline{A Scandal In Bohemia}
\noindent To Sherlock Holmes she is always \em{the woman}.
\footnote{Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.}
\begin[family=Snell Roundhand]{font}
Consequetur adipiscing elit.
\end{font}
\end{document}
Rinohtype, written in Python. The input format is reStructuredText. See an example input file.
Maybe more to come.
I have recently discovered an awesome system Typst which is on par with LaTex with regard to typesetting quality, but superior in other aspects, i.e.,
You can watch a demo on the website https://typst.app/ to see points 1, 2, 3. Point 4 is illustrated by
Some side information, i.e.,
Typst is funded by the Technical University of Berlin, the State of Berlin, and the European Union (through the European Social Funds). With such sponsors, it already has a promising future.
The authors have opened source the Typst compiler. They will open a public CTAN-like registry of Typst packages and templates down the road.
The public beta will be released on March 21, 2023.
The Discord server is https://discord.gg/2uDybryKPe. The authors are very supportive in answering your questions.
First, add XyVision to the list of proprietary batch composition competitors.
Here's a bit of commentary I wrote up a couple of years ago, which still applies. It's also on the ConTeXt wiki.
https://groups.google.com/forum/message/raw?msg=comp.text.tex/8zugdUxw6dI/mu7Qzs4bQDYJ
Using a typesetting tool isn't like being a prisoner selecting a tool to dig their way out, it's more akin to being a galley slave....
So,
using Quark is like being chained to an oar which is covered w/ splinters and mostly broken at the other end and which will randomly break due to being poorly carved (Quark has crashed on me 183 times this year) leaving one adrift or run aground, or sometimes returning the vessel to its starting point (a few of those crashes have resulted in unrecoverable document corruption --- my autobackup folder may contain 2 or 3 GBs of files for a given iteration of a particular project each month) --- the oar can be smoothed somewhat and reinforced (by purchasing or finding XTensions, using XTags &c.) and periodically one is required to purchase a new oar (sometimes just after the previous one has been customized adequately). For some tasks, one can impress any graphic designer as a galley slave to ease the effort for others, but while charts are available, there are no automagic navigation options and every journey must be manually piloted.
using InDesign is pretty much the same except the oar is smoother and stronger (it's crashed 29 times on me thus far this year), there aren't as many customization options and it's not quite as easy to find a candidate for impressment (though soon it'll be as easy as for Quark). Charts are available, but again, piloting is strictly manual.
using Plain TeX one has to craft the vessel's oar oneself (as well as the rest of the vessel unless one is typesetting a clone of The TeXbook), but it's as sturdy and as nice a one as one's skills allow and can even be an engine which moves the vessel in and of itself --- it can be difficult or impossible to find people suitable to help w/ either carving the oar or using it though, but once a given journey is worked out, the oar becomes magical and rows for itself except for when one runs into an unplanned for obstacle (the navigation charts are old ones and not often up-dated, with a lot of ``terra incognita''), allowing one an auto-pilot option for certain journeys, dependent upon one's skill.
using ePlain, an oar is provided, can be customized, and can be enchanted and the charts are okay, but have a lot of ``terra incognita'' on them.
using LaTeX, an oar is provided and there're lots of nifty customizations and improvements already available, and one can impress additional oars from CTAN, however on a semi-random basis, adding one oar will break other oars, sometimes leaving one adrift or run aground. One can enchant a set of oars to accomplish a given journey, easing the piloting requirement, and the navigation charts are decent and obstacles are fairly well-known.
using ConTeXt, a very nice oar is provided, which has lots of customization options, but the navigational charts aren't easily read by a traditionally trained navigator at first, although they are fairly compleat and most journeys can be carefully worked out, but once one is, it is quite automatic and there's a good auto-pilot option.
A new alternative is Patoline, which is still in an early development stage but the goal is to be a modern digital typesetting system.
As for the LaTeX compatibility one can describe the Patoline compiler as
Obviously, a related (but much smaller) project is the Patoline compiler, which compiles a mixed Wiki/LaTeX/Ocaml syntax into a variety of output formats, including traditional PDF files, but also web servers that deliver dynamic contents, synchronized for instance with a talk.
The documentation includes a PhD thesis and a description of the syntax which was produced using Patoline, and which looks to me as an amateur in typesetting pretty good:
While LaTeX is the markup language of choice in many scientific and scholarly circles (especially in the fields of mathematics, computer science, physics, and astronomy), some scholars are starting to write papers using new markup languages tailored for the web. Markdown is one of them. It is very versatile and it can be easily extended to satisfy the needs of scientific writing. The advantage of using Markdown (or similar) instead of LaTeX is that we are writing on the web more than ever. Thus, it makes sense to use a web native typesetting format. For those who would like to use both Markdown and Latex on the web, Authorea (full disclosure, I am a co-founder) is an online social authoring platform that allows articles to be edited in both formats simultaneously. Authorea also renders and compiles LaTeX and MathML equations to the web, in addition to PDF.
TeX and friends maybe still the best. There are some alternative and results are various. I do not really use any of them, but kind of know there existence.
As long as you don't need mathematical typesetting, you actually can find better than TeX with Heirloom Documentation Tools. Not only does it provide Knuth's algorithm for formatting paragraphs; it also allows to compute spacing by mixing three systems (interletters spacing, interwords spacing, imperceptible change in the shapes of the glyphs). Thus you can work with constant space between words! Selecting a font among various kinds of fonts is much easier and quicker than with TeX. I have been using it for years while my colleagues use LaTeX; they wouldn't have the idea to only think their documents can be on a par with mine. If you are interested in typography, then Heirloom version of troff is definitely the way to do.
edit: Since I first wrote this answer, it looks like new pieces of software have appeared. I just heard about utroff which seems to come from Heirloom troff; I will very certainly have a look at it and probably use it now because Heirloom troff doesn't seem to be actively maintained and may be difficult to compile.
I recently found this page: https://www.texfaq.org/FAQ-alternatives
Which lists:
Active projects
- Patoline
Patoline is a typesetting system written in OCaml and using a mix of TeX-like syntax and “escape” to OCaml to provide typesetting control. Patoline aims for a module design, and fast numerical processing.
SILE is a typesetting system written in Lua and using the HarfBuzz font shaper. It’s input syntax is somewhat inspired by LaTeX, for example
\begin{document} Hello SILE! \end{document}
is a valid SILE document (notice the lack of a preamble here).
- Speedata Publisher
Speedata Publisher is like SILE written in Lua, but uses LuaTeX (not pure Lua) to provide the “back-end”. This means it does feature a tiny TeX-based wrapper, but once that has handed over to Lua, TeX is not involved. Speedata Publisher is particularly well-suited to some areas in which TeX is less successful, for example more image-rich documents. -Lout
Lout is a batch document formatter invented by Jeffrey H. Kingston. It reads a high-level description of a document similar in style to LaTeX Lout copies some of its formatting algorithms from TeX but uses a high-level functional programming language, instead of a macro language as its customisation language. Lout has never had the user base of LaTeX, but is still maintained and was released around the same time as LaTeX2e in the early 1990’s.
- troff/nroff/groff
groff The *roff family of typesetters pre-date TeX and influenced its design. They have always been distributed as part of Unix and Unix-like systems such as linux. Most notably man pages are typeset with this system.
Historical projects
- The ANT typesetting system
The open source software TUSTEP is developed and used at the German university of Tübingen and is apparently mostly used for
(copied from the project webpage http://www.tustep.uni-tuebingen.de/tustep_eng.html). The pdf manual seems to by typeset with TUSTEP and Ghostscript.
The software seems to be operational since 1971 if I understood an ai translation of http://www.itug.de/index.php?id=58 correctly. The most recent version apparently was published in 2022.
I have never used the software and I do not personally know anybody who uses it.
Another alternative to LaTeX is OpTeX. It runs with LuaTeX.
Pollen, written in Racket (of the Lisp family). The primary focus is web-based typography (and no math so far), but it can also support other formats such as pdf.
R Markdown runs on the TeX distribution when using kntr to create PDFs. But, to type in it requires less code memorization since R produces default YAML headers when you load up a new document.
Scientific Word can be another alternative software for scientists: http://www.mackichan.com/index.html?products/sw.html~mainFrame
The company behind this software is MacKichan Software, Inc., and went out of business on July 1, 2021 (http://www.mackichan.com/index.html?products/sw.html~mainFrame):
Sales have ceased for Scientific WorkPlace, Scientific Word, and Scientific Notebook
MacKichan Software, Inc., after providing word processing software for those who speak the language of mathematics for forty years (under several names), closed its doors on June 30, 2021. This marks the end of sales and support for the MacKichan Software products.
All owners of Scientific WorkPlace, Scientific Word, or Scientific Notebook should have a serial number that was included in their purchase. This number is also included in the license file for your installation as the last line in the file. If you need to install your software on a new or different computer, you will need to re-activate the software on that computer using that serial number. The software can be activated as before, using the Help/Activate menu item. This contacts the MacKichan Software licensing server, which we will keep running for at least two years.
Thirty-day trials of all of our products are discontinued. Trial serial numbers will no longer work to activate the software.
Sites with permanent site licenses will, of course, be free to use Scientific WorkPlace, Scientific Word, and/or Scientific Notebook as long as they like. Those sites that have paid for maintenance with home-use satellite licenses can continue, but will be unable to create new satellite licenses after their maintenance agreement expires.
We expect to make Scientific Word an open source product eventually. Since both Scientific WorkPlace and Scientific Notebook contain the proprietary computer algebra system MuPAD, they cannot be made open source. When the open source project for Scientific Word is established, an announcement will be made here.
We hope to make version 5.5 of Scientific Word available in the future. It currently contains several components that are licensed and not owned by MacKichan Software. These components need to be removed, and our intention is then to make Scientific Word version 5.5 open source.
Barry MacKichan President MacKichan Software, Inc.
July 1, 2021
The latest released version of these products is 6.1.2. To update your program to the latest release, click here. The same page also contains links to the installers for version 5.5 and the manuals for versions 5.5 and 6.
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) has been evolved to cover many aspects of typesetting and book publishing. Modern browsers already did the heavy lifting part and with the aid of JavaScript publishing can be done in browser.
https://vivliostyle.org/ is a FOSS project that uses CSS + HTML to publish pretty books, and provides both decent math typesetting capabilities via MathML and vertical writing comparable to what pTeX could provide.
There are other CSS publishing tools and they are listed on https://www.print-css.rocks/tools with showcase available. While their coverage on CSS standards, vendor provided features, prices, and typesetting qualities are all different, some of them are also worth mentioning because in my opinion they also provide equal typesetting quality.
Antennahouse sells the XSL-FO formatter which also supports a good amount of CSS specification, that is used by O’Reilly Media to publish books. The formatter has good multilingual and MathML typesetting support. (The other commercial XSL-FO formatter XEP from RenderX, although it can also produce pretty looking books, does not seem to have math support, so not listed here)
PrinceXML supports a much wider range of CSS standards and has just enough JavaScript support to run MathJax3 (or KaTeX) to get prettier than native MathML result.
Disclaimer on equal typesetting: If taking the mind-blowing Hz and protruding extension implemented by pdfTeX into account, then neither of those mentioned in current answer at current state exceeds or even come to close TeX’s typesetting quality in my honest opinion, but to my knowledge neither do most other typesetting engines except a few the most experimental ones (thus usability is in doubt) mentioned under this question (and automatically excludes InDesign) have implemented them. So as long as it uses dynamic programming to line break text and has the basic math typesetting capability I consider it has equal typesetting.
