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Re: Preaching DSSSL (Re: using LOUT)
From: |
Rolf Marvin B|e Lindgren |
Subject: |
Re: Preaching DSSSL (Re: using LOUT) |
Date: |
02 Sep 1997 13:57:06 +0200 |
[Mike Dowling]
| I too once enthused about SGML. The thing that I greatly disliked
| about LaTeX is that they made an upgrade to LaTeX2e from a soup of
| files to be found at some CTAN archive.
installng LaTeX2e is very simple, simpler in fact than the
previous version. one needs to understand what one does, tho.
| TeX is an oddball program, written in WEB, which serves only to make
| it inefficient, and designed to be converted into PASCAL, a toy
| programming language.
this is very misleading. TeX is very, very fast, and extremely
portable. It was written in 1977, at a time when Pascal was a leading
language, and uses no extenstions at all. TeX is available for any
computer system I've heard of, including NOS/VE and the Sinclair QL.
WEB is a variant of Pascal. The most common UNIX implementaton
translates to C.
| It writes a superfluous file (name.dvi) to disk instead of writing a
| postscript file to stdout.
With the obvious advantage that dvi can be converted to any printer
format, so the user is not restricted to having a PostScript printer.
| Silliest of all, you cannot simply download a tar.gz file from CTAN;
| packages are always a soup of individial files.
I haven't found this to be much of a problem. in particular, with
LaTeX2e it's uncommon to have to use unstandard packages.
| Ah, I thought, SGML is the solution. It's a IEEE standard, and
| upgrades will therefore be seldom, and hopefully more reasonable.
Yes, but SGML is Something Else. it's not a typeetting language, it's
an information representation language. It' nots designed for
typesetting, you need a parser and a typetting engine for that. B
| But if you have very complex formatting requirements, then SGML lacks
| the semantics for their creation.
it does not; it has all the semantics you need. if your book is not
run-of-the-mill, of course you have to write your own DTD and parser.
| In short, the purpose of SGML would appear to be restricted to those
| documents with simple structures which one would like to have in
| many, different formats.
SGML documents can have any structure you want. Linuxdoc is _not_ SGML,
no more than HTML is. both are _applications_ of SGML.
| Specialised stuff requires specialised type setters.
SGML is not a typesetter, so this statemnt is nonsense.
--
Rolf Lindgren
address@hidden
- Re: Preaching DSSSL (Re: using LOUT), Pierpaolo Bernardi, 1997/09/01
- Re: Preaching DSSSL (Re: using LOUT), Paul Prescod, 1997/09/02
- Re: Preaching DSSSL (Re: using LOUT), Mike Dowling, 1997/09/02
- Message not available
- Re: Preaching DSSSL (Re: using LOUT),
Rolf Marvin B|e Lindgren <=
- Re: Preaching DSSSL (Re: using LOUT), Sean Russell, 1997/09/02
- Message not available
- Message not available
- Re: Preaching DSSSL (Re: using LOUT), Valeriy E. Ushakov, 1997/09/03
- Re: Preaching DSSSL (Re: using LOUT), Sebastian Rahtz, 1997/09/03
- Re: Preaching DSSSL (Re: using LOUT), Valeriy E. Ushakov, 1997/09/03
- Re: Preaching DSSSL (Re: using LOUT), Sebastian Rahtz, 1997/09/03
- Re: Preaching DSSSL (Re: using LOUT), Mike Dowling, 1997/09/04
- Re: Preaching DSSSL (Re: using LOUT), Peter da Silva, 1997/09/03
- Re: Preaching DSSSL (Re: using LOUT), Sebastian Rahtz, 1997/09/03
- Re: Preaching DSSSL (Re: using LOUT), Peter da Silva, 1997/09/03
- Re: Preaching DSSSL (Re: using LOUT), Sebastian Rahtz, 1997/09/03