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Crap, this is starting to get embarrassing. :-) Please ignore the Pandoc mention. I intended to comment on that yesterday, but my intermittent connection got disconnected and when I got to it now, I had forgot by then that the question, besides Markdown, has *already* mentioned it.

Also, I'm surprised that nobody seems to be using ConTeXt instead of LaTeX.

However, I pine for the day when I can just do epublatex document.tex or taggedpdflatex document.tex and get awesome output. I don't want to have to rasterize my graphics either... I just want it to work. It's coming, I'm sure.

Take a look at ConTeXt -- epub support there is far from complete, but seems to be coming along more quickly than it is for LaTeX. epub information on ConTeXt wiki

Subject of several theses:

http://www.tug.org/docs/liang/

http://www.pragma-ade.com/pdftex/thesis.pdf

https://www.tug.org/docs/plass/plass-thesis.pdf

(John Hobby's on METAPOST http://ect.bell-labs.com/who/hobby/thesis.pdf )

Probably others. More information at

http://www.tug.org/

and

http://www.latex-project.org/

and

http://wiki.contextgarden.net/Main_Page

William

The point is: it is EASIER and FASTER to just move object with a mouse from point A to point B, rather then type a code statements and render.

Fortunately LaTeX already placed the object at point B for me, so I don't have to move it at all. Still, as long as you got a money without typing a code statements, that's all good, and I'm sure your book's a great read.

(Aside: I don't actually use LaTeX any more; I've moved on to ConTeXt, which I heartily recommend.)

LaTeX is basically just a macro package for TeX. There are other implementations that might suit your needs better - like ConTeXt for example.

There is a replacement for LaTeX on up

http://wiki.contextgarden.net/What_is_ConTeXt

The idea is access with TeX without all the headaches. It is popular though I know LaTeX so the headaches don't bother me so much.

There is a WP2LaTeX tool http://www.penguin.cz/~fojtik/wp2latex/wp2latex.htm available for both Windows and Linux which does a pretty decent conversion. BTW inserting accented characters in TeX & friends is rather straightforwards: \`e, \'e, \"e etc so you can usually get by with just a couple of extras keystrokes on a standard US keyboard.

Colour is easy. Either use C or M or Y and K (trivial) or use specific colours and post-process w/ PitStop to force given spot colour(s). Look at Sandefur:

http://www.atlis.com/services/composition/samples/ TeX%20Sample%20Pages/

as an example. ConTeXt allows one to do arbitrary named spot colours though of course, it doesn't include any licensed colour libraries:

http://wiki.contextgarden.net/Colors

One of these days I'm going to look into making use of its technique for this in LaTeX.

Placed graphics usually ``just work'' and of course, one can handle things programmatically --- although the Sandefur example above doesn't show it, there were two different ways graphics could be placed, dependent on the horizontal size, naturally there was only one macro to place a graphic, it measured the graphic and placed it appropriately. Granted when floats don't fall out properly there's a bit of wrestling involved, but at least in LaTeX everything re-flows and all one's references, ToC, index &c. update automagically.

Doing this sort of thing in InDesign and the like fills me with absolute boredom and tedium. Far better to solve things in a macro once and for all.

William

As before:I think XML is the best-fit for most projects & LaTeX is appropriate for those projects which already have legacy documentation or share documentation with papers submitted to journals. However, I neglected to give a shout out to ConTeXt. ConTeXt also uses the TeX backend to produce beautiful results, but is a bit easier to program in.

That's confusing! For a few seconds I thought you were talking about ConteXt which I don't think would make a good replacement for a text editor.