Thanks, Paul. How about setting up a system for us? ; -) Yes, Tom mentioned that The Pragmatic Bookshelf uses their own code base on top TEX.
I hear about 40,000 lines of code total for the site. : -) -Owen On Jan 11, 2:25 pm, Paul Howson <[email protected]> wrote: > LaTex is a macro package which runs on top of the TEX typesetting > system, the latter being invented by Donald Knuth in the early 1980s. > > LaTex is an appropriate choice if you want one of the pre-designed > document types which LaTex provides (think Word templates). > > However for a book which will require custom layout and formatting > (and it will), LaTex is not necessarily the most sensible choice. > Often it is better to just use plain TEX and design your own macros as > you need them for the elements of your particular publication. > > One important point to make is that both TEX and LaTex date from the > 1980s, which was pre-Unicode. Handling anything other than 7-bit ASCII > in these systems requires special "escape sequences" which is messy. > > There is now a version of TEX which supports Unicode. This is called > Xetex. On the Macintosh, Xetex integrates directly with the OSX font > system, so you can utilise any installed font easily. > > I believe there is also a companion Unicode-aware LaTex called > XeLatex. I haven't used that. > > I can speak from personal experience, having produced numerous books > using both TEX and more recently Xetex. I've also set up automatic > server-based document generation systems using Xetex and having > Unicode support makes a BIG difference to the simplicity of the > authoring process. These systems go from Unicode TEX markup to PDF in > one step. > > You might be interested to know that the "Pragmatic Programmers" use > TEX for many (all?) of their books and they have an online book > regeneration system whereby registered purchasers of a book (e.g. > their Ruby on Rails book) can download a freshly generated PDF of the > very latest version of the book on demand. Try doing that with Word! > > Markup-based publishing systems, like TEX, offer a flexibility which > WYSIWYG systems like Word cannot. You author at an abstract level of > document structure and the TEX software interprets your embedded > directives (which you can define however you want) to produce the > final document. It's somewhat similar to the idea of compiling source > code into an executable program. > > Paul Howson > Queensland, Australia.
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