Re: [gradle-dev] ditch latex?

[Adam Murdoch]

Russel Winder wrote: On Tue, 2008-10-28 at 09:23 +0100, Hans Dockter wrote: [ . . . ] One unique selling point of LaTeX is that it is a true type setting system. It calculates the position for every letter it writes, based on algorithms containing many of the rules of the typesetting craft. You can publish a book with LaTeX. I doubt that the apache FO can compete here. This is the reason why most of the modern mark up languages have a transform to LaTeX code. But there is a docbook to latex converter (as well as latex to docbook converter). Apache FOP is no match for LaTeX But it is for our purposes. hence why so many XML toolchains convert to LaTeX and use it. We certainly could do this if we wanted to. Some publishers even go this route, though one or two have XML-FO processing toolchains that avoid LaTeX -- but they cost large amounts of money. Of course the real question is which is the primary documentation set and how is that most easily produced and maintained. If PDF is the main thing then LaTeX is the winner. If website is the main thing then an XML/XSTL/XML-FO based system might be viable, though I would probably still go with LaTeX because of the PDF aspects. More importantly, the documentation describes how to do the customisations, which cannot be said for the atrocious tex4ht documentation. Was latex2html ever considered? I did have a quick look at it. I kept going with tex4ht because: - latex2html wants you to put html specific markup in your source. Tex4ht doesn't. I really don't want output specific markup in the source (well, any more than we've got already). - The html generated by latex2html is very lossy and retains no semantics whatsoever, so I couldn't see how I could possibly style it up using css. Tex4ht does retain some sematic information in the generated html, so I managed to do most of what I wanted using css. The tex4t website doesn't do well on the documentation front does it. If it weren't for you, we would still have the crappy html user's guide, because it was not obvious to me how to configure tex4ht. So I see your point ;) Of course now that the main trick to configuring tex4ht is sorted out, the rest is CSS programming, so now even more can be done to make the site look cool. Even with LaTeX. :-) Oh, I wish that were true. We probably wouldn't be having this conversation if it were. I've hit the absolute limits of what I can achieve for html generation with latex. I still not happy with the results: - There's empty partial rows at the end of each table. - The labels from the sample source and output are missing. - Some, but not all, of the Verbatim output is losing its indenting. - Monospaced text has extra trailing whitespace. - I don't really like the front page. - I can't include any of the content in the website. The generated html just doesn't have enough semantic information in it so that I can use css to solve these problems. I need to change the generated html. I can't figure out how. I can't even figure out if it is possible. The html generated by docbook carries all of the semantic information with it, so it is an easy task to use css to style it up. And the docbook user guide describes in detail how to make customisations to the html generation, with examples for common cases. Adam --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe from this list, please visit: http://xircles.codehaus.org/manage_email