A mini D book: Markdown or LaTeX?

[Chris via Digitalmars-d]

On Tuesday, 24 January 2017 at 14:27:15 UTC, aberba wrote:
> Which one works well? I'm more concerned about syntax 
> highlighting and line numbering (in some cases). Support for 
> custom fonts.

Depends on what you want to achieve. LaTeX has loads of packages 
that can be installed and you can create professional looking 
layouts. It is quite impressive. I know people who write articles 
and their Ph.D. thesis in LaTeX to get maximum control over the 
layout (to avoid Word-like surprises). LaTeX is accepted by many 
publishers, printers etc., especially in the tech sector. The 
downside is the source code. It's not very nice to read and you 
get lost easily. And try to get back after a year and change 
something! Also, you have to convert it to PDF each time you 
wanna (proof)read it, so you usually deal with two layouts at the 
same time (source code and PDF/HTML), which is time consuming and 
error prone.

 From what I can see, Markdown is much nicer to read and you don't 
need to switch between source code and layout all the time, but 
it is rather limited in comparison to LaTeX. You wouldn't have 
the fine grained control over the layout and you would most 
likely have to convert it to something else before you can send 
it to a publisher / printer. They don't want to waste time with 
exotic or lesser known formats, because they have their own 
infrastructure set up, which leads me to the next point.

A lot of publishers will prefer Word, because they can easily 
edit it and if they have their own layout section, they will 
transform Word to txt and paste it into say Adobe InDesign.

So if you want to publish privately on your homepage or blog, 
pick whatever you want. If you want to publish on one of those 
self-publishing websites, check what they support. If you want 
the old fashioned publisher ask them first what format they want. 
Believe me, you can safe a lot of time. Imagine you create the 
perfect layout with LaTeX and then the publisher goes "Thanks, 
er, can you please send it to me as a Word doc?"

I for my part have stopped worrying about it too much. Just write 
the text (in Word or an Ascii editor) and think about the layout 
later. It helps you to focus on the content rather than on the 
optical structure - and if you have to change, add, delete or 
re-arrange things, it won't cause you any headaches. Write first, 
design later.