Re: The beauty of LATEX

on Mon Oct 17 2011, Joel de Guzman <joel-AT-boost-consulting.com> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> There's been a resurgence of LATEX usage, especially on the Mac
> platform, thanks to TeXShop on the Mac, which started it all
> and TeXworks (cross-platform: http://www.tug.org/texworks/).
> This link:
>
>   http://nitens.org/taraborelli/latex
>
> reminds us how powerful and beautiful rendered LATEX documents
> can be.
>
> I am amazed at how mature TeX has become. XeTeX (http://tug.org/xetex/),
> for example, is a free typesetting system based on a merger of TeX
> with Unicode and modern font technologies such as OpenType or
> Apple Advanced Typography (AAT), available for all major platforms.
>
> To be honest, I've been quite disappointed with DocBook and its
> ugly hack (tool chain) at generating PDF files. Perhaps it's
> about time to reconsider other options for generating PDFs.
> For example, I don't recall if we've ever discussed dblatex
> before (http://dblatex.sourceforge.net/doc/) ?
>
> Anyway, I guess if it still goes through the complex XSLT tool
> chain, I'll still have my doubts. Another way is to decouple
> the back-end of quickbook to allow it to directly generate
> HTML, or LaTeX in addition to Docbook. Quickbook started out
> generating HTML anyway and it should be reasonably doable to
> refactor the code, decoupling the output generation. The only
> problem I see is that some folks (e.g. John M), have written
> Quickbook templates that leverage more advanced features of
> DocBook. 

If you want to go this way, quickbook should build its own internal
representation of the document structure and you can integrate the
representational capabilities for these features into quickbook's
internal schema.
-- 
Dave Abrahams
BoostPro Computing
http://www.boostpro.com