Re: The beauty of LATEX

On Sun, Oct 30, 2011 at 2:10 AM, Joel de Guzman
<[email protected]> wrote:
> 3. Backends:
>
>  a. The template engine is work in progress. The final design
>     should be powerful enough for tree transformations like the
>     ones Daniel concocted.
>  b. The template engine transforms the IR into the final form
>     (e.g. LaTeX, Docbook, HTML etc.).

Can you explain a little bit more how the template engine works to
finally transform the IR?
Using your example...

> We should be working on a full schema and I propose a minimal DocBook
> style scheme using simple Qbk/Gaea syntax. Example:
>
> [book title
>  [chapter ch1
>    [section sect1
>      [para ... ]
>      [para ... ]
>      [para ... ]
>    ]
>  ]
> ]

I thought that the [para ...] template will get evaluated before the
[section ...] one. This will generate something like
"<para>...</para>" in the case of the Docbook back-end and that is
what the [section ...] template will get as an input. Is that right?
>From your comments about footnotes processing for HTML it seems that
the [footnote ...] template generates the reference inplace and also
returns the actual text for the footnote wrapped in a certain way so
it survive the [para ...] evaluation and is then available in the
[section ...] template or even in the [chapter ...] one for them to
arrange where they will finally end up. Could you elaborate on how the
evaluation steps will actually take place?

> (aside I'm not sure if we should do it the old way using section/
> endsect, or a real block structure like this. There are tradeoffs,
> but I do not want to digress. I'm sure you know what the tradeoffs
> are).

If you want to follow the design you sketched, I think this is a good
change and we should move away from [section] and [endsect].

Best regards
Matias