Re: offtopic: which text language to use?
Quoth David Roundy,
> I don't know anything about docbook (which quite likely is very good), but
> latex isn't bad either (and being a physicist I pretty much have to know it
> anyways). I've looked briefly at some docbook source, and it looked (to my
> untrained eye) uglier than latex source, and harder to input. But that's
> probably just because I am unfamiliar with it.
>
> latex2html gives reasonably good (but a tad ugly) output. If all you want
> is perfectly functional output, it should be fine. You can see an example
> at http://civet.berkeley.edu/paratec/ (just the manual to a code that you
> don't have access to...).
>
> Probably if you don't want to typeset any math, though, you're better off
> using docbook... but I can't vouch for that.
As a social science (criminology) doctoral student, writing a PhD thesis
in LaTeX, I'd argue very strongly that it's useful for people who don't
need to write lots of complex equations.
LaTeX, Xemacs, BibTeX and SiXPack (a perl/Tk BibTeX reference manager)
are a wonderful combination.
DocBook tags seem to be a bit more intrusive than LaTeX ones (I do lots
of php/html coding by hand, and I'd much rather write a document in
LaTeX than in html), and LaTeX has been around for a long time, is very
stable, and is supported on many platforms. It also produces great pdf
output using dvipdfm.
cheers,
damon
--
Damon Muller :: Department of Criminology :: University of Melbourne
Did a large procession wave their torches
As my head fell in the basket,
And was everybody dancing on the casket...
-- TBMG, "Dead"
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