Why TeX is more relevant now than ever

Kaveh Bazargan
River Valley, UK

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TeX is around 30 years old, and was conceived and written before the advent of laser printers, personal computers, PostScript and of course the Internet. At that time the idea of WYSIWYG document editing was just a futuristic idea. When people jumped on the WYSIWYG bandwagon, it was predicted that old technologies such as TeX which used mark-up for text would disappear in time. The advent of the Internet brought mark-up to the attention of the public. Somehow it was acceptable again. The recent move to the semantic web and HTML5 has brought renewed attention to mark-up and the need for clear structure in text. I suggest that we have gone full circle and now realise that mark-up is everything. And TeX, which has the most readable and minimalist mark-up might just be the best tool today for structured documentation.