TeX is a type setting language, not a writing language. LaTeX inherits this. Unless you know ahead of time the exact dimensions you will be displaying your book at you shouldn't use either. ReST on the other hand can be resized to your hearts content which is what you need for digital publishing.

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blenderob 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

> Unless you know ahead of time the exact dimensions you will be displaying your book at you shouldn't use either.

This is incorrect. You can sure write LaTeX that is intricately dependent on the output dimensions. But you can just as easily write LaTeX that is independent of output dimensions.

Case in point is compiling LaTeX doc to HTML which you'd admit is easily resizable.

Case in point is also writing LaTeX docs for journals or publication where you can easily resize the document to match the publisher's style guide and dimensions by changing the documentclass.

	▲	noosphr 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Compiling latex to html means you have lahtml, not latex since it doesn't use the tex back end. Using styles means that you use someone else's backed in page size settings and still need to recompile when you change to a new style.

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kazinator 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Anything can be resized without touching the document, if you don't care whether it looks like shit.

The TeX philosphy rejects that. When TeX can't format a paragraph beautifully, it emits diagnostics like "overfull \hbox".

That's totally incompatible with being able to dictate a width, and expecting things to fit without having to get involved.

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yawaramin 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Technically, plain text can be resorted to your heart's content. You don't need ReST for that. But in practice if you're writing a serious technical book and you need a serious markup language, you will likely end up with DocBook XML for its flexibility and large range of outputs.

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JohnKemeny 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

LaTeX cannot be resized?

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noosphr 4 days ago | parent [-]

Not without rebuilding the whole document and editing the source code. A lot of packages only have a few sizes they support on top of that.

	▲	Tor3 4 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I'll say that's inaccurate. The dimensions of all the documents I've written over the years depend on the document class I use, and as our company keeps changing document layout standards every few years, the document class changes as well.. but the only source editing necessary is to replace the very first line in the document, i.e. changing the document class. And the whole document changes. Sometimes completely, much more than just sizes.
	▲	JohnKemeny 4 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Oh, you mean that a PDF cannot be resized? Because the LaTeX document itself is very simple to "resize", by changing paper type, font size, num columns, etc, and you don't have to compile to PDF, you can compile to EPUB or HTML, if you prefer that over PDF. But, yes, PDFs are intrinsically non-resizable.