AzTeX is a project to produce a typesetting system suitable for use in the Arts and Humanities.
The TeX typesetting system, along with LaTeX, has been the standard for typesetting in science, engineering, and mathematics for more than 30 years. Though it produces beautiful output, it's extrordinarily complicated and is not well-suited for general academic use.
AzTeX is so named to credit TeX's influence and to imply the system's function. Ultimately, it shares very little with its namesake.
AzTeX is not simply a typesetting system, but an extensible platform upon which a typesetting system is built.
The most important design goal is the stable definition simple stack-based programming language (inspired by Forth) which can be implemented by an average programmer in a very short time. The actual typesetting system will then be implemented in this language to aid in the system's portablility and extensibility. While porting TeX on a new platform is a large and complex undertaking, porting AzTeX should take less than a week, necessitating only the implementation of a simple interpreter.
As documents themselves will also be AzTeX programs, extentions and document classes must necessarily provide users with a simplified domain specific language to "hide the details" to make document creation simple. The end result, by convention, should appear to be a simple markup from the perspective of the end user. Basic Book and Article classes will be produced to aid in defining these conventions.
The base language is still being defined, though the basic design is settled.
As freely as can be managed. The degree of control necessary to minimize fragmentation (for the benefit of end users) is as yet unexplored.
Under current constraints, as of June 2013, initial development is expected to take 2-3 years. Check back infrequently for updates.