03-03-LaTeX.Rmd

## LaTeX

LaTeX (a set of macros for TeX to interpret) is the most known plain text based document preparation system.
The ecosystem has been growing and evolving for more than 50 years, and it is very used in Academia as well as for
preparation and publication of books that contain complex material.
It is the de facto free software standard for high quality typesetting.
Traditional output formats are DVI, PostScript or PDF.
Although it can be used as an standalone system, it is typically used as an intermediate format.
Other tools in this analysis (e.g. DocBook, Pandoc and/or Sphinx), use LaTeX as part of the pipeline for generating PDF.

<aside>
**W** [LaTeX](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaTeX),
[TeX](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeX),
[Device independent file format](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Device_independent_file_format),
[PostScript](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PostScript),
[PDF](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF)

- [latex-project.org](https://www.latex-project.org/)
- [latex3](https://github.com/latex3)
</aside>

### Interesting features

During so many years, several thousand packages have been contributed to Comprehensive TeX Archive Network (CTAN), which
cover very general requirements and also very specific features.
Support of different languages, character sets, currencies, math, etc. are some of the most known features, along with
built-in automatic numbering, cross-referecing, footnotes, list generation, etc.
At the same time, [tex.stackexchange.com](https://tex.stackexchange.com/) is a very active and welcoming community where
package authors do typically help new users.
Furthermore, thanks to drawing capabilities provided by PGF and TikZ, a whole category on their own, programatic
generation of complex and very high quality diagrams, plots, etc. is one of the most relevant features.
For example, in the context of hardware design, *tikz-timing* package allows describing waveforms.

<aside>
- [ctan.org](https://www.ctan.org/)
- [ctan.org/pkg/pgf](https://ctan.org/pkg/pgf)
- [ctan.org/pkg/pgf](https://www.ctan.org/pkg/pgf)
- [ctan.org/pkg/tikz-timing](https://ctan.org/pkg/tikz-timing)
- [texample.net/tikz/examples](https://texample.net/tikz/examples/)
</aside>

### Drawbacks

The main limitation of LaTeX is that the whole ecosystem is focused on generating printable documents.
Well, actually, documents with very specific page layout requirements.
Conversely, in HTML the exact rendering is not specified in the document.
As a result, there is no mechanism to nicely browse a LaTeX document as an interactive HTML website.
Some very interesting CSS templates exist for generating web sites that feel familiar to LaTeX documents.
However, those are not expected to be matched with arbitrary LaTeX sources, but manually written instead.

<aside>
- [texfaq.org: Conversion from (La)TeX to HTML](https://www.texfaq.org/FAQ-LaTeX2HTML)
- [latex.now.sh](https://latex.now.sh/) ([vincentdoerig/latex-css](https://github.com/vincentdoerig/latex-css))
</aside>

A relevant exception is rendering of math equations.
MathJax is a well-know open source JavaScript library that provides a display engine for LaTeX, MathML and AsciiMath
notation.
Almost any other tool in this analysis does use MathJax for displaying LaTeX equations in HTML.

<aside>
**W** [MathJax](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MathJax)

- [mathjax.org](https://www.mathjax.org/) ([mathjax/MathJax](https://github.com/mathjax/MathJax))
</aside>

Another relevant caveat of LaTeX is the fairly steep learning curve.
This is probably due to the huge numbers of resources available with partially or apparently overlapping features.
On top of that, the archaic, verbose and apparently obscure macro language makes it less appealing than other (markup)
languages in this analysis.
In fact, that's one of the main motivations to use AsciiDoc/DocBook, Markdown or reStructuredText instead of plain LaTeX.