High quality typesetting system [closed]

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I'm looking for a high quality typesetting system to replace TeX.

My problem with TeX is that it's too brittle to deploy for John Doe. I need something that I can package with my Java app, unzip somewhere on the user's computer and 开发者_如何学编程be sure that it will work.

If the system is written in Java, that would be great but I'm collecting options right now.

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I'm very fond of the python documentation suite sphinx. Deployed it in several organization with various level of computer knowledge and the result has always been great! Can generate html as well as LaTeX output.

Sphinx uses reStructuredText as as its markup language.

Other candidates might be:

1. Perhaps simplified docbook docbook.org/schemas/simplified, but as you say, it doesen't define a render

2. www.pango.org and/or pangopdf.sourceforge.net

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After some searching, I found these resources:

New Typesetting System (NTS): "The New Typesetting System (NTS) is a reimplementation of the typesetting system TeX in Java". Unfortunately, the project is dead and the website is down. From the Wikipedia article:

First of all, NTS is too slow to be used for production purposes, which does not motivate users to switch to this engine. Furthermore, the by-then standard extensions such as e-TeX were not included in the code. Also, in order to be useful today, PDF output as well as pdfTeX-specific extensions need to be implemented. Finally, by being 100%-compatible with TeX, the sub-processes of NTS are rather interwoven (due to the nature of traditional TeX), which thereby makes the task of adding extensions less simple than had been envisaged.

The ExTeX project took over. It's basically a reimplementation of TeX in Java and tries to improve TeX instead of creating a 1:1 clone in Java.

That means you get the layout engine plus a TeX parser but you can use either or both as you need.

Lastly, there is the luaTeX project but it's a 1:1 clone, so it suffers from most of the shortcomings as TeX. Unlike ExTeX, they try to improve the situation in small steps, for example by allowing to write macros in lua.

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Pandoc is very nice.

If you need to convert files from one markup format into another, pandoc is your swiss-army knife. Need to generate a man page from a markdown file? No problem. LaTeX to Docbook? Sure. HTML to MediaWiki? Yes, that too. Pandoc can read markdown and (subsets of) reStructuredText, textile, HTML, and LaTeX, and it can write plain text, markdown, reStructuredText, HTML, LaTeX, ConTeXt, PDF, RTF, DocBook XML, OpenDocument XML, ODT, GNU Texinfo, MediaWiki markup, textile, groff man pages, Emacs org-mode, EPUB ebooks, and S5 and Slidy HTML slide shows. PDF output (via LaTeX) is also supported with the included markdown2pdf wrapper script.