Co-developers wanted: document markup language

[Jeremy Sanders]

Torsten Bronger wrote:

> I don't know exactly what you mean but the answer is probably no.
> For example, I want the author to state the title, keywords, etc of
> his document, however, he should not state that he wants the title
> printed centred and 4cm from the top of the page.
> 
> The latter is defined in the "theme" which will be given as a set of
> ordinary LaTeX commands (for the LaTeX backend).

Isn't the problem that making such a theme will be very hard?

One of the annoying things about LaTeX is lack of control over positioning
(e.g. floats, page breaks...). The one thing most LaTeX users moan about is
trying to get their document to fit into an n page limit (e.g. for a
proposal). Maybe the theme could have some options to control spacing,
however, like some sort of CSS.

I think the one thing that would improve LaTeX is orthogonality in its
commands (e.g. why no 8pt option for the document, why the crazy \small,
\LARGE, etc commands?), and fixing the font system to be based around
modern fonts. Finally making bibtex part of the core and making it easy to
use would be great.

-- 
Jeremy Sanders
http://www.jeremysanders.net/