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Re: [Axiom-developer] Re: Pamphlets and LaTex


From: Stephen Wilson
Subject: Re: [Axiom-developer] Re: Pamphlets and LaTex
Date: 18 Jul 2007 01:18:12 -0400
User-agent: Gnus/5.09 (Gnus v5.9.0) Emacs/21.4

"Andrey G. Grozin" <address@hidden> writes:
[...]
> > The critical and (as I am now seeing) subtle point is that latex only
> > sees the markup as a typesetting construct, where in fact the
> > construct means a completely different thing to the absolutely
> > necessary tools like weave and tangle.
> No, I absolutely disagree with the above statement. LaTeX commands and
> environments are *not* typesetting constructs! Their puropse is to
> encode the logical structure of the document, not its visual
> (typesetting) form. Styles associate some visual meaning with various
> logical concept; one can easily change the style, and get a different
> typeset output from the same (logically) document.

Run latex on any .tex file.  You get a dvi.  I agree that latex does
an exceedingly good job of abstracting away the details of typesetting
proper.  But that ability is what makes it an extremely good
typesetter.

[...]
> If there will be a vote :-), please count my vote for the pure LaTeX
> syntax of pamphlets. This eliminates a lot of complexity: one more
> syntax to learn (with all its warts to escape << and >>, etc.), one
> tool which is no longer needed. It is easier to use the familiar LaTeX
> syntax (which was designed to encode structure, i.e., the meaning, of
> any concept). We can add as many concepts as we need. In fact, any
> author writing any non-trivial text in LaTeX always adds some new
> concepts, and this is the the use for which LaTeX has been
> designed. Some LaTeX command may mean "run this command through
> Axiom", when used in a proper context. Why not?

Why not?  Beacuse latex typesets documents.

You can use C++ templates to calculate all the prime numbers at
compile time. That does not make it the best solution to the problem.

> Entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity.

Of course not.  That is one of my main points.  Why specify something
in latex, claim that it is latex, and yet require a tool other than
latex to make use of it?  The duplicity is not that it is written down
twice rather than just once, the duplicity is that the entities needed
to describe what you wrote are replicated in various software tools,
with no clean unifying relationship.


Steve





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