I want to start typesetting my own novels and stories so I can publish them myself, but I don't want to use LaTeX.

The MOM macros for GNU troff (groff) look like they might be straightforward.

http://www.schaffter.ca/mom/mom-01.html

@starbreaker I recently discovered asciidoc (and the tool asciidoctor) and it seems cool. Powerful, plain text, but with much more features than plain markdown. And you can generate PDFs without having to go via LaTeX

@ebel @starbreaker I keep hearing about asciidoc, and another LWML that Debian uses for docs. I should compare....

@dredmorbius @ebel You could, but I I have books typeset on Unix with troff, and I've always found them readable.

@starbreaker @ebel troff is quite readable.

It's not nearly so writeable.

@starbreaker @ebel I used it for seveal essays and papers at uni. I've forgotten virtually all of it.

I occasionally look to it for updating manpages, an tend to run screaming.

@dredmorbius @ebel I've reverse-engineered COBOL programs edited by a hundred different people. How much worse can this be?

@starbreaker Well, I won't argue with you on that one, but I'll note tha I'm no longer competing to fing the most painful and aggrevating computer environment.

What I like about Markdown is that it makes the easy stuff easy, and much of the slightly more complex still ain't bad.