Re: The beauty of LATEX

On 10/19/2011 3:21 AM, Dave Abrahams wrote:
> 
> 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.

Yes, that is what I envision. Alas, it seems Quickbook now is too
tied to Doxygen/Docbook. It might be better to simply leave Quickbook
as it is and start a Quickbook-2 rewrite with a decoupled backend
in mind. You might cringe at the thought of another Doc tool, I
know that you are an advocate of ReST, but I would assert that
we Boost/C++ folks are in the best position to provide tools for
documenting C++ and no other tool I know of is flexible enough to
cater for C++ needs (think Concepts, for example), than Quickbook,
especially with its template mechanism.

I really would like to have Quickbook evolve outside of Boost into
a stand alone documentation tool for C++. In my spare time, I am
starting to write an article series based on our 2008-2009 BoostCon
talks about using Spirit to build a compiler (but this time targeting
LLVM). I would like to eventually compile the article series into
an e-booklet (possibly self-publishing). That is my real intent on
why I want a LaTeX backend.

Regards,
-- 
Joel de Guzman
http://www.boostpro.com
http://boost-spirit.com