Re: offtopic: which text language to use?
David Roundy <droundy@civet.berkeley.edu> writes:
> 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.
Not entirely. Docbook (or any SGML DTD, really) is more verbose and
less flexible on input than LaTeX, so it could be more annoying to
input. This is its strength and weakness... the flexibility and
eccentric syntax which makes (La)TeX so convenient to enter makes it
more difficult to translate.
There are tools to help edit both, so it's often a matter of personal
choice which one prefers. I prefer LaTeX these days, as the Emacs
support is more advanced, but one of these days I'll switch to SGML,
certainly.
Some things one might consider in deciding are the needs one has. For
example, LaTeX has bibliographic support, and more mature maths,
including editor support for both.
> latex2html gives reasonably good (but a tad ugly) output.
For non-commercial use, there's also tth
<http://hutchinson.belmont.ma.us/tth/>. OTOH, I'm fairly sure that
you can get RTF out of DocBook more easily than LaTeX, and you can
easily get HTML.
--
Alan Shutko <ats@acm.org> - In a variety of flavors!
Immanuel doesn't pun, he Kant.
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