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Comment on Ask HN: is HTML5 ready to takeover LaTeX in academic publishing?

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LaTeX is built for typesetting, and is very good at that. HTML, of any variant, is not.

I want to break the "LaTeX is the only possible alternative" point here, so your comment is very important to me. LaTeX is BUILT for typesetting, this doesn't necessarily mean that is GOOD for that. Sure, as far as we are all accustomed to its intricacies, LaTeX is very good for typesetting on PAPER. But what I am arguing is that:

  * maybe it's no more necessary to publish on paper,
  * maybe a new tool is now better for publishing even if it's not meant for it (but a lot of the new tags in HTML5 suggest that it might soon target book publishing).
So, could you please elaborate on your point? Why is LaTeX better for typesetting than HTML5?

You make an interesting point; LaTeX is certainly less relevant if you no longer target paper. At the very least, though, I have yet to see any text renderer or layout engine that can make a wall of text quite as aesthetically pleasing. Perhaps I'm merely biased.

By the way, this article is from 2005 http://www.alistapart.com/articles/boom

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