Hi Bill, On 27 September 2011 22:52, William Hart <[email protected]> wrote: > Lex: > Please note that these are friendly complaints.
Taken as such and the complaints about the complaints given in the same spirit. I am also a software > developer. I spent the time writing this up and mailing the link to the > asciidoc list in order to share my experiences. I am clearly a demanding > user, since I want advanced features like math equations, code insertion and > bibliographies to all work. Asciidoc is clearly a useful tool 'out of the > box' for less demanding users... And since you have admitted being a software developer then I will have less hesitation in demanding that you assist in improving Asciidoc support for your needs, remember its open source with no budget and volunteer support :) > --Bill > >> 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. > > Even after you say that AsciiDoc is only a content markup language, I'm not > sure what this means precisely. That was a general statement, what it means is that the document writer has little or no control of formatting from within the document. Formatting and layout controls are backend specific and provided mostly outside the document. >From my user perspective, the default > layout of the latexmath environment for equation blocks differs from my > expectations in HTML. This is a specific complaint. Since the latexmath layout is controlled by the latexmath javascript renderer, again asciidoc doesn't have much control. This is the result from running the 'asciidoc' > command, so you need to own up to part of the responsibility of the > formatting, even if AsciiDoc is 'only' a content markup language. Well, yes asciidoc includes the .js in the html, if you program in js then you could propose changes to support your requirements without breaking existing documents. > Now, is this an AsciiDoc bug? No. Is this a problem for users? > Potentially. I thought that it was enough of a problem that I wrote a > custom latexmath environment and reworked the format. Please share the changes. > >> 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. > > For HTML and PDF files, I don't care about MathML. Well, for asciidoc generated xhtml you do care because the latex is converted to mathml by the javascript renderer, and then the comments about mathml apply. For dblatex you don't care, no, but for FOP you do. It's only appears useful > for epub. I did consider generating SVG files for epub, but a variety of > blogs noted that that can often lead to ugly documents. Yeah, the general problem seems to be that the necessary SVG fonts are not available by default, but I'm no expert. I think it's fair > to say that "There is only limited support for generating eBook documents > that contain mathematical equations." True, my complaint about your complaint (and really this is the general point of most of my complaints) is that because the problem isn't (all?) in asciidoc we can't fix it, but you are giving your readers the impression that this is a problem within asciidoc. Unfortunately by saying that asciidoc "doesn't support" something implies that this is the case for all backends and all use cases, so your readers will look to the wrong place for improvements and would be justified in not even looking at alternate configurations or backends or other approaches that might meet their needs (even if not yours :). AsciiDoc doesn't support the SVG > generation out of the box, and I had run out of time and energy to try and > make it happen. > Pity, it would have been good for someone to contribute SVG support (assuming some converter is sufficient quality) >> 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. > > What I had to work around is that the $, \[ and \] symbols get passed into > the HTML translation engine. Thus, you cannot insert the formatting into > the latexmath block itself. My rework is to simply hard-code the latextmath > block to provide that \[ and \], and around that I added the HTML formatting > logic. Not being a Latex person I don't understand the details, but could you share the changes please? > >>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. > > Um.... asciidoc could simply recognize multiple :author: declarations. > Seriously, this does not look like a complex issue to resolve... Well as a software developer you know that sometimes, simple things are hard to do ... :) Multiple declarations of attributes won't work, I don't know what language you develop in so I hope this makes sense, but :attribute: value is the asciidoc equivalent of name = value in an imperative language, doing it multiple times just gives you the last value. To make it do anything else will mean changing the entire semantics of attributes which would not be backward compatible. The multiple authors would need to be defined in a single construct since they need to go in the one <authorgroup> entity with each author in an <author> entity. And asciidoc doesn't support any construct with an arbitary number of parameters each of which is wrapped the same. That would again be a significant change that requires someone to do it. > >> Problems with citations are caused by known dblatex bugs. > > Yeah, I saw that. Bummer. This issue should be highlighted in the asciidoc > documentation and examples. > Well, the problem with putting such information in the docs or website is that it could go out of date easily. Whilst it might be ok for something like this that isn't expected to be fixed, in general Asciidoc doesn't have enough resources to monitor all the backends and update things when they fix their problems (including epub support for mathml etc :) 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.
