Alternatives to LaTeX

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:

Math typesetting

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:

Line and page breaking

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:

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.

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

• master pages based on arbitrary conditions
• text flow based on "frames"
• multi page tables including subtotals and repeating tablehead and tablefoot
• easy to install/use fonts
• grid based layout/typesetting
• ...

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.

https://www.speedata.de/

I'd like to invite everyone to try out or perhaps work on the software. Development never ends (as usual).