On 26 September 2011 10:10, William Hart <[email protected]> wrote: > FYI, I recently posted a blog about my experiences using AsciiDoc. > > http://wehart.blogspot.com/2011/09/using-asciidoc-for-mathematical.html > > Although I've identified a variety of limitations of AsciiDoc, I'm not sure > that I would call any of them bugs per se. (For example, one of the issues > I noted has to do with the behavior of dblatex, and not the asciidoc or a2x > commands.) > > But, I thought the perspective would be useful.
Hi Bill, The perspective is interesting in that it appears to show you having a common misunderstanding of Asciidoc. You complain about lack of control of various presentation/layout issues, but Asciidoc is explicitly only a content markup language. This is because all but HTML outputs go via docbook, which has no presentation features. As you said, if you want control, use Latex or some other markup which has presentation/layout capabilities. I'm not sure how to address this misunderstanding, it comes up many times. To the specific points: You note that epub only just supports mathml, then complain that Asciidoc doesn't support converting to it already. But you never asked for assistance in setting that up. In fact HTML support is via a javascript latex to mathml converter and for epub you could use an external converter using the techniques I discussed with you for SVG or image. You complain about formatting of math in HTML, but never asked about it. Do you know that you can do it? The Mathml standard explicitly leaves a lot of the styling up to the renderer, ie the browser. Can you write anl html+mathml document that centers/indents the mathml, portably, in most browsers? My (admittedly limited) attempts didn't work. Multiple authors is a known issue, but no one has come up with a nice suggestion of how to do it. I'm sure Stuart is open to suggestions. Problems with citations are caused by known dblatex bugs. Asciidoc generates legal docbook, verified by W3C validators and by the fact that FOP works fine. This is not an asciidoc problem, and so far the dblatex maintainer has resisted making dblatex standards compliant, preferring to use the latex bibliography mechanisms. Thats his choice, but it means that valid and portable docbook doesn't work in dblatex. And Asciidoc doesn't have the resources to maintain separate toolchain specific backends (offers welcome). In respect of mathjax (in the comments), did you look at http://quaoar.us:8080/mathjax-xsl.html? Cheers Lex -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "asciidoc" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/asciidoc?hl=en.
