Re: CrossTeX

[Frank Küster <frank@debian.org>]

Robert Burgess <burgess@systems.cs.cornell.edu> wrote:

>> Does that mean I need to learn Python to be able to customize styles?
>>   
> I have a few ways of answering this.  One is that styles are
> implemented in Python, so yes; a better one is that they are carefully
> set up so that someone can just copy-and-paste parts of existing
> styles without even knowing that they're looking at Python; an even
> better one is that learning Python in order to accomplish a particular
> style feature you want is better than learning BibTeX's style language

Very true.

> or some domain-specific language I could make up.  More people already
> know Python than could write a .bst file.  

That is true, tue.

> And, like I said, I went
> out of my way when writing the style system to make it easy to compose
> different styles with only a couple lines of very simple code I could
> explain to someone who thinks Pythons are large snakes.  In the end,
> though, you have to learn some language to do anything truly new, and
> I believe Python is a good choice.

I was thinking about some kind of XML (which, I admit, am not able to
design and write). In particular because there already exist many
parsers and graphical editor frontends.

But I haven't looked at the format, and anything else than bst is a big
improvement, of course. So I don't vote against Python (which I never
learned, but have the feeling that I'm quite well able to read just
because it is logical and "clean").

Regards, Frank
-- 
Frank Küster
Debian Developer (teTeX/TeXLive)