Typesetting Systems Currently In Use
by SyntaxError
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date: 2024-09-05
tags: #unix #typesetting #troff #texinfo #latex #markdow #poll
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During part of past week until today I did a survey on Mastodon
about *nix typesetting systems. The survey was the follwoing:

+ Which *nix typesetting system do you use/prefer?
 - troff
 - LaTeX
 - Texinfo
 - Other (which one?)


I was limited to four options so I had to choose among three and I
left the fourth slot for everything else.

- troff has to be in representing de roff family because roff was
 the first Unix typesetting system.

- LaTeX instead of TeX because I think the vast majority of people use
 LaTeX and not pure TeX.

- Texinfo. I added it because it is the "preferred tool" for the GNU
 Project.


157 persons took part on the survey. For computing the fourth option
I did the following:

- When people made a comment with more than one system I took the
 first one.
- I grouped all the markdown variants under Markdown
- I left out things that I do not consider a typesetting system
 like LibreOffice and HTML.
- I rounded the numbers in order to make it easy. That's why here
 Latex has 75% instead of the original 76% (This is not a scientific
 study).

Now let's see the results:

1. LaTeX     ######################################## 75%
2. troff     ######                                   11%
3. Markdown  ###                                       4%
4. Typst     ###                                       4%
5. Org Mode  ##                                        2%
6. Asciidoc  #                                         1%
7. Scribble  #                                         1%
8. SILE      #                                         1%
9. Texinfo   #                                         1%


The winner by large is LaTeX but this is an expected result. The other
results are more interesting to me:

- Troff has aged well and it continues to have its loyal users. Roff
 was the first system and people keeps using the roff family, a very
 nice finding.

- It seems that Texinfo is quite niche like the other less known
 systems (Scribble[1] and SILE[2]) even being the standard for the
 GNU Project. I was impressed because I thought Texinfo will have a
 larger userbase.

- Markdown family having the same numbers of Typst[3] is another
 surprise. The first prerelease of Typst is March 21, 2023 while
 Markdown has been around since 2004 and everybody says it's
 everywhere.

The systems that are new to me are: Typst, Scribble and SILE. I
learned about them during this survey and I found them interesting,
especially Scribble.

Among the comments some people shared their pipeline like
@DigitalMark (sed filters + multimarkdown + wkhtmltopdf) and
Alex Schroeder (Markdown to HTML and HTML + CSS to PDF using
Weasyprint)

I want to thank everyone who took part on the survey and to everyone
that boosted the survey in order to have more reach. Without you
this has not been possible :-)


====================== UPDATE 2024-09-08 ============================
I had a comments exchange through Mastodon and I'm adding them here
because I find the definition given by @[email protected]
for a typesetting system is the most accurate I've seen.

+ @[email protected]
 @syntaxerror actually scribble uses latex to obtain PDF, and also
 asciidoc, so I would not count them as real typesetting systems.

+ @[email protected]
 @chakuari Maybe you're right but I think it is needed to have some
 flexibility. If we remove that flexibility Markdown should not be
 there too and I really don't know where to put the line.

 It is something like Typescript is or it's not a programming
 language because it transliterates to Javascript.

 I'm more surprised that someone has read my post. Thank you for
 reading and for taking your time to share your thoughts

+ @[email protected]
 @syntaxerror Yeah, maybe I was too strict. But for me a
 "typesetting language" means a way to describe how the page must
 be built, where to put text/images/whatever, how the formatting
 must be done. None of these can be done with markdown alone,
 nor asciidoc. Just that. Anyway, interesting post. Thx.

========================== UPDATE END ===============================

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[1] Scribble Web Site: https://docs.racket-lang.org/scribble/
[2] SILE Web Site: https://sile-typesetter.org
[3] Typst on GitHub: https://github.com/typst/typst