Joseph Wright wrote: > On 27/04/2015 07:35, Philip Taylor wrote: >> Going even further off-topic, but pursuing this one aspect of the >> thread, is there not only real one problem : the need to educate users >> to cease marking up their documents in raw (La)TeX syntax, and instead >> to express them in well-formed XML ? I have just finished typesetting >> (using [plain] XeTeX) a 544pp book marked up entirely in XML, and whilst >> I have made no efforts to generate PDF/UA, I am convinced that the task >> of so doing (assuming that the necessary primitives are or were >> available in XeTeX) would have been 1/1000 of the effort needed to do so >> had the book been marked up in traditional (La)TeX syntax with its usual >> accompanying conflation of form and content. > > As Ross says in a parallel message, XML raises different issues and is > not a panacea. For a start, we can ask if XML is a particularly good > format not only here or for anything (there's a blog post by Linus > Torvalds suggesting the answer is 'no'!). Assuming XML is at some level > a good plan, that still doesn't make it a good plan for the end user nor > ensure that the end sure will stick to logical structures. There's also > the business that TeX is useful because sometimes we do need some visual > adjustment or programming element.
Let me address the last point first, because it is by far the easier to rebut. In the 544pp book to which I referred earlier, there are occasional places where TeX's typesetting system, in the absence of explicit guidance, produces sub-optimal results. This is overcome at the XML level by the simple expedient of attributes (where such can be restricted to a single element): <Para indentation="none" vadjust="0,75" hbadness="4000"><image status="active" vadjust="-1,8" source="FO+78-81-57-1813" repository="NA" callout="Document_2"></image><foreign language="Greek">Διὰ τῆς παρούσης μου ἀναφορᾶς ἀναφέρω τῇ ἐξοχότητί της, ὅτι κατὰ τὸ ͵αωαʹ ἔτος or of pragmats (where they may be required in a more general situation): <Para><pragmat code="\looseness = 1 \emergencystretch = 0,1 em \tolerance = 9999 \hbadness = \tolerance \parfillskip = 0 pt plus 0,3\hsize \relax"></pragmat>In April 1813 the then Patriarch of <place>Jerusalem</place> <owner-individual indexterm="Polykarpos,_Patriarch_of_Jerusalem">Polykarpos</owner-individual> (1808–27) wrote to <other-person indexterm="Liston,~Robert">Robert Liston</other-person>, the British Ambassador in The former are used fairly frequently to optimise appearance; the latter are used in only a very few places. As to whether "XML is a particularly good format not only here or for anything", all I can say is that in my experience we (humanity, that is) have not yet come up with anything better; LaTeX 2e, by explicitly permitting the conflation of form and content, fails abysmally in this respect (IMHO, of course). ** Phil. -------------------------------------------------- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
