On Mon, Jul 23, 2001 at 12:19:12PM -0700, Peter Jay Salzman wrote:
> i asked this of micah in private, but realized that other people might have
> the same question.
(I'll answer here, for everyone's benefit).
> how in the world can latex generated from sgml code look even remotely as
> beautiful as hand generated latex?
The idea is to seperate the content from the format /totally/. Thus,
all content goes into the DocBook SGML format - but the format is
handled seperately by style-sheets. XML/XSL is a great combo - but
unfortunately the currently available free tools don't seem to be so
terrific. I use DSSSL as my formatting engine (Dynamic Style Sheet
Specification Language, or something), which is Scheme plus
typesetting functions. This is the counterpart to the SGML source,
which allows you to format your text as precisely as LaTeX. OpenJade
uses DSSSL to process SGML source files and produce output to TeX
(JadeTex), RTF, MIF, FOT (for XSLT translating), SGML and XML (for
HTML, for instance).
Still, the JadeTeX /source/ isn't gonna look as pretty as hand-coded
LaTeX, no doubt ;)
> does this mean that i have to give up beautiful typesetting and settle for
> good-looking typesetting?
No, but if you want the beautiful typesetting, you need to learn a new
typesetting language...
Of course, since (at least for my purposes), DSSSL gets /translated/
to TeX, it's entirely possible that some TeX features simply are not
available in DSSSL. But I doubt there'd be much - since OpenJade's primary use
seems to be for output to TeX, I'm sure any necessary features will be
added as extensions - and will be used by Norman Walsh's DSSSL modules
for DocBook.
Micah
