Guide formatting - need a better typesetting system

So, guide formatting here is... clunky. Very, very clunky. You can achieve nice effects with it, but basically anything involving positioning content requires fiddly hand-tweaking of awful hacks. It's clunky to the point that making a guide look good was such a PITA that it has actively put me off making another, or even merely updating my existing one.

I understand the desire to keep guide formatting relatively simple so that it is easy for new guide authors to pick up, but you should seriously consider adding an 'advanced' formatting option that lets you use a safe HTML5/CSS3 subset or such - or really any semi-sane typesetting system. I'm not asking for LaTeX or anything here (although come to think of it... ;P), but as it is I doubt I'll ever want to write another guide because it'd be such a struggle with the formatting to get it to look the way I want it to look.

So this means that you are lazy to code everything in BB?I mean, on paper doesn't look that good, but when you release it you get some sort of an satisfaction.

Experimenting is all you need. Heck, it took me a month to write my first guide because I was testing the formatting every time.

But like Wulfstan said, you'll get the HELL YEAH! feeling when you get your guide as it is. Just read Dr. Dre's formatting guide. He also linked it to a few good websites.

I would also like to see an "HTML5/CSS3 advanced option", but BB code suits me just fine. I doubt it would be worthwhile developing these tools just to format guides that are already easy to format to great effect.

You may have missed the point about me already having gotten a guide looking like I want it to look. Having done so, I'm loathe to either update it or write another due to two main problems:

1. The current formatting system is very limited in what it can do in terms of positioning of elements/division of horizontal space. What you can do with it is very fiddly, requires manually tweaking every last bit and will never line up quite right.
2. The current set of supported bbcode tags/elements is pretty limited - we don't even have a (preferably configurably-sized) 'horizontal rule' element.

#1 is most of what is dissuading me from updating my existing guide; any update to certain sections will require a lot of messing about with the formatting just to keep things looking the same.
#2 is mainly in respect to writing more guides.

Again, I'm not saying that "you can't do anything good-looking with this system", I'm saying "there's no reason the formatting system should require so much hand-tweaking of element positioning instead of supporting proper layout mechanisms". I'd rather spend less time fighting with an unwieldy formatting system and more time developing content - wouldn't you?