Serge Stroobandt's user avatar
Serge Stroobandt's user avatar
Serge Stroobandt's user avatar
Serge Stroobandt
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About

My attraction to LaTeX grew slowly. I first saw LaTeX in use by some friends at the university back in 1995. It was not love on first sight. I was still living the WYSIWYG illusion, and suffering a lot writing a microwave engineering thesis with the wrong tool (MicroSoft Word). In 1998, I finally learned my first mark-up language: HTML.

Around 2002 I discovered Microsoft Word™ does not guarantee any backward compatibility for old MS Word™ documents with formulas. It took me until 2003 to pick up a German Markt+Technik book to get me started with LaTeX. I never looked back. The excellent LaTeX packaging system induced me also to look into GNU/Linux which became my one and only operating system since 2007.

Since 2013, I use both ConTeXt and LaTeX mainly as templating language for all my document production needs, including curriculum vitae, letters, journal articles,... whereby the actual content is written in pandoc Markdown. I am an isodoc letter class contributor and I developed a new LaTeX document class for Belgian medical prescriptions. I also dabbled with Beamer and enjoyed embedding Python code into LaTeX using Pweave.

However, I also stumbled against some severe LaTeX (and ConTeXt) limitations, mainly the fact that LaTeX is not intended for unattended typesetting! From there grew my interest in unattended typesetting using CSS for use in organisational settings where you simply cannot expect everybody to code in LaTeX (and at least a few others profoundly hate Microsoft Word™!) My personal website, serves as an excellent test bed demonstrating the unattended conversion of Pandoc Markdown over XHTML to Prince XML generated PDFs, including BibTeX citations and LaTeX math converted to SVG using MathJax.

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