SVG in 3?

[Michael Ashton]

On Sunday, March 23, 2003, at 08:06  PM, Andrew Shugg wrote:

> On Friday, March 21, 2003, at 02:14 PM, Michael Ashton wrote:
>> LaTeX is great, and offers much of this sort of thing right now, but 
>> it's too hard to make its output look like I want it to. None of the 
>> LaTeX tools really play nice with modern stuff like PostScript and 
>> PDF. I like PDF; LaTeX isn't even aware of it.
>
> How about DocBook?

There are things I don't like about it, but it's a very sophisticated 
and useful markup.

> Admittedly, it's a high-level documentation description language, not 
> a typesetting language like LaTeX.  But it's XML, and I'm pretty sure 
> that TeX/LaTeX can be generated from DocBook (as well as PostScript, 
> PDF, HTML, RTF, plain text, flavoured milkshakes, etc etc etc).  So if 
> there were specific layout things that you couldn't get (for whatever 
> reason) using DocBook and stylesheets, you could pass those bits 
> through LaTeX ... but I'd imagine that you could do "pretty much 
> everything" without LaTeX (wonderful as it is, and much as I love it).

My main issue at the moment is not with markups - there are loads of 
nice ones available - but with the tools to generate output. At this 
point I'm leaning heavily toward using TeX for typesetting, due to its 
math capabilities, and some form of XML for the input format. I'm also 
very interested in ReStructured Text, which is a wonderful format for 
typing things in: see docutils.sf.net.


----
Michael Ashton <data at ieee.org>
*** We interrupt this signature for a special war statement: ***
I see the work we are part of in Iraq, and I have seldom been more 
proud of my country and my tax dollars - and of Britain: America and 
Iraq thank you from the bottom of their hearts. Let freedom ring for 
Iraq and its people!