X-VM-v5-Data: ([nil nil nil nil nil nil nil nil nil] ["3552" "Thu" "26" "November" "1998" "13:13:49" "GMT" "Sebastian Rahtz" "s.rahtz@ELSEVIER.CO.UK" nil "82" "Re: portable LaTeX" "^Date:" nil nil "11" nil nil nil nil nil] nil) Received: from listserv.gmd.de (listserv.gmd.de [192.88.97.1]) by mail.Uni-Mainz.DE (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id OAA08986; Thu, 26 Nov 1998 14:14:17 +0100 (MET) Received: from lsv1.listserv.gmd.de (192.88.97.2) by listserv.gmd.de (LSMTP for OpenVMS v1.1a) with SMTP id <10.8402FE06@listserv.gmd.de>; Thu, 26 Nov 1998 14:14:17 +0100 Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 411456 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Thu, 26 Nov 1998 14:14:11 +0100 Received: from pillar.elsevier.co.uk (root@pillar.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.222.35]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id OAA05944 for ; Thu, 26 Nov 1998 14:14:09 +0100 (MET) Received: from snowdon.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.197.164]; by pillar.elsevier.co.uk (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP; for ""; sender "s.rahtz@elsevier.co.uk"; id NAA16506; hop 0; Thu, 26 Nov 1998 13:05:49 GMT Received: from screavie.elsevier.co.uk by snowdon.elsevier.co.uk with SMTP (PP); Thu, 26 Nov 1998 13:13:55 +0000 Received: from lurgmhor.elsevier.co.uk (lurgmhor.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.197.7]) by screavie.elsevier.co.uk (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id NAA23652 for ; Thu, 26 Nov 1998 13:13:42 GMT Received: (from srahtz@localhost) by lurgmhor.elsevier.co.uk (8.8.5/8.8.5) id NAA28971; Thu, 26 Nov 1998 13:13:49 GMT References: <199811261227.NAA14424@na6.mathematik.uni-tuebingen.de> Message-ID: <199811261313.NAA28971@lurgmhor.elsevier.co.uk> Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project In-Reply-To: <199811261227.NAA14424@na6.mathematik.uni-tuebingen.de> Date: Thu, 26 Nov 1998 13:13:49 GMT From: Sebastian Rahtz Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L Subject: Re: portable LaTeX Status: R X-Status: X-Keywords: X-UID: 2935 Marcel Oliver writes: > So I conclude what I have been trying to say, maybe not so clearly, > before: We need a standard for portable LaTeX which is necessarily a > subset of the capabilities of native LaTeX. I think the strongest hmm. if you go this way, you may as well change the syntax, make it < and >, so that what you treat as LaTeX is in fact valid XML..... > is processed through a TeX backend. Also, this seems more or less > orthogonal to the goals of LaTeX3, because it is mainly a matter of > convention, and not of fundamental hacking in the LaTeX the program. now there i agree 100%, as I suspect They will too. > It is important to keep in mind that most of the documents that we > academics write don't go via a publisher. These are class notes, > informal exchanges, short reports, grant proposals etc. Most of these > are routine, but some are important and significant documents. Thus, my apologies. you ARE right about this. though I could and would argue that people who spend 3 days tarting up the look of their grant proposal don't deserve the grant :-} ........... > In short, the fact that most publishers cannot accept a carefully > prepared LaTeX file causes hours of proofreading on a level which is > below the standard of the submitted document. We have every interest > to avoid that, and I think that's the same for the publishing > professions... too right. i think the situation you describe is shocking, and I am ashamed of my profession. seriously. > > i know i sound like an evangelist, but XML/MathML/SVG really *are* > > designed to cover this sort of game. your SVG graphic will embed > > MathML markup cleanly. > > Again, are the necessary authoring tools available? Will it allow me > to easily typeset (!) my personal documents? have you actually *tried* Office 97 to compose your memos? Office 2000 will use VML, I understand. No, I dont use it either, but really, thats what most of the world `typeset' with. its not THAT bad quality. ..... > Would it be hard to write a script which takes an eps file, runs it > through LaTeX/psfrag, and converts the dvi output back into eps with > the same bounding box (preferably not using bitmapped fonts and > including only those fonts that are needed)? This way one could meet no. thats what i would do if i was asked to routinely handle psfragged documents. > Maybe one could even try to implement the equivalent of -Wall into the > LaTeX engine (or as a package) so that authors could check without ha. interesting idea. > If someone now says why not SGML then: The advantage of LaTeX from the > author's point of view is that it is a single platform for authoring, > typesetting and document exchange (where, I believe, the problems can ah, but see above. is it *so* much harder to type
Introduction
a+3 This is fun
than the \ and {}? then you can run this through "LaTeX" as you do now, but it has the benefit of also being XML to validate against a DTD (if you wish). sure, you cannot use \catcode tricks, but you do already accept the idea of a subset dialect. No, you don't have to lose \def entirely. Doug Lovell's TeXML (see http://www.ibm.com/xml) might be of interest to people in this context. My point is that "strict LaTeX" and "XML" are barely inches apart, really. I know They will agree with this too.... Sebastian