On Fri, 30 May 2008, Maurí­cio wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Just because I'm curious: how could a typesetting system like TeX
> be if it was created today? I've tried google and wikipedia, and
> all I found different from TeX is a system called 'Lout', but it
> seems dead.

There is ant http://ant.berlios.de/, but it is supposed to be saner form 
of TeX (in terms of source code, and easy of configuration) which was 
developed from scratch. The user interface is quite similar to TeX. I do 
not know much about the internal differences between Ant and TeX.

> Does anyone knows about novel or interesting ideas that could be
> used if we would write a new typesetting system from scratch?

River detection, which is done by ant, but not by TeX. Also since the 
computers now are more powerful, I think that doing page breaking on a 
global manner (or atleast by looking two three pages down, rather than 
just the current page), will make certain things (like long mathematical 
forumlas, and complex footnotes) appear nicely without a lot of manual 
tweaking.

Aditya