On 5/26/13 2:03 AM, H. S. Teoh wrote:
I don't know, to me DDoc is still lacking a major feature: a mechanism
for per-character translation. The problem is that many output formats
have a different scheme of metacharacters, and some (most notably LaTeX)
require special transcription of certain characters. Right now, the only
way to handle this correctly in DDoc is very painful: write macros for
every special character and logical entity (like mdash, nbsp, and the
like), which makes it very hard to write. Your text would look like:
$(T)his is Mr$(DOT)$(NBSP)T$(APOS)s $(DOLLAR)0$(DOT)02
recip$(EACUTE)$(MDASH)as seen on TV$(DOT)
This problem is mostly evaded when you're targeting a single output
format. Once you start targeting more than a single output format, the
number of required macros grow exponentially. Making the DDoc source
targetable to *arbitrary* output formats requires practically wrapping
every character inside a macro, which is impractical.
To work around this problem with the current version of DDoc, you'd need
an external utility to do the transcriptions for you, which is a hassle.
ESCAPES has been recently defined to partially fix that.
Also, LaTeX has about the same limitation. Someone defined an
"ActiveTeX" derivative in which each character was active (and therefore
potentially definable as a macro). As far as I know it didn't catch up,
which may be a sign that people were okay without that capability.
Andrei
