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Technical authoring, especially in the computer documentation genre, is commonly discussed in terms of structured authoring, and might be becoming synonymous with it.

In structured authoring, the "meaning" of the text is kept seperate from the "presentation" of the text. DITA is a commonly-discussed standard.

Within LaTeX communities, the presentation of the text is regarded as very important, even (and particularly) in technical and scientific documents.

How can I explain the advantages of using LaTeX to an author or editor from a structured authoring background?

David Carlisle
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johntait.org
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  • This link is a good place to start. The first paragraph echoes your definition of "structured authoring". Then it goes into some detail about how that happens with TeX. http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/Document_Structure – Ethan Bolker May 24 '13 at 14:56
  • Advantage compared to what? If compared to Word processors like MS Word or LibreOfficeWriter: Everything, that matters to him. If compared to DTP software it becomes a little bit more differenced. – Toscho May 24 '13 at 15:30
  • LaTeX is structured authoring without the XML overhead, sort of. – Alex May 24 '13 at 16:54
  • In theory, the meaning and the presentation are separate in LaTeX. Presentation can be isolated into a document class, and meaning in the main document content. See also Separation of content structure and style in LaTeX? – Mike Renfro May 24 '13 at 21:26
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    One of the problems is that the interfaces to LaTeX (editors) are not as heavily WYSIWYG-ised as some of those to XML (especially DITA), although both still have a lot of problems for the non technical editor. Given the structural requirements of a lot of tech doc, I couldn't recommend LaTeX as an authoring or storage format -- XML is the correct choice for this. But for formatting the output, LaTeX is ideal (converted using XSLT2, for example). Unfortunately the tight binding between editor interface and WYSIWYG display leads most people to miss the fact that there are other ways to do this. – Peter Flynn May 26 '13 at 19:44

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