Re: [Texmacs-dev] Re: Including documents Request for feature

[Joris van der Hoeven]

On 11 Dec 2003, Alvaro Tejero Cantero wrote:
> This debate is of great interest for me. I am programming a template
> suite/dependency handler for Alqua so that, basically the process for
> authors is the following:
>
> 1. write chapter1.??? to chaptern.??? (??? stands for any plaintext
> -based format).
> 2. write some metadata about what they've written.
> 3. run a program which takes the chapters, the metadata and a carefully
> designed "master template" and mix it all to assemble a nice-looking
> book in multiple formats from a single source format broken in
> manageable pieces (aka chapters).
>
> It is key for the success of the project to have the cascading feature,
> since that way
>
> * authors can have their chapters layout however they like, normally
> best suited for proofreading... They don't need to care about
> presentation
>
> * I can use the master template to override the chapters' layouts and
> set a good-looking, uniform appearance for a set of documents.
>
> So, in short, I think there's an use case here for the cascading
> approach that Jan is demanding.

I am not sure that I understand what you mean by the "cascading feature".
Something similar to CSS? In TeXmacs, we rather use TeX-like style files,
which is a bit different approach, which actually allows you to do more,
but sometimes in a less elegant way.

In any case, the current mechanisms implemented in TeXmacs enable
you very easily to do what you request (even if this is not plainly
documented yet). Indeed, this is exactly what we do for the TeXmacs
documentation, which can be read in hyperlinked format, as articles,
as books, or on the web. It suffices to take another style file to
get another appearance.