Re: sgml or latex?
linuxman@263.net writes:
> 1. (*) text/plain ( ) text/html
(Please post in plain text only, no need to send HTML mail...)
> Latex and sgml are all widely used in linux documentation world, but
> who can tell me which one is the best and which one will be the best
> in the future?
LaTeX has the advantage of being extremely standardized and widely
available. It's also fairly extensible, though this may or may not be
a good thing. There are several books out there on LaTeX, and lots of
readily available online documentation (try texdoc(1), for example).
It's a little more oriented towards writing things like mathematical
papers than computer documentation, but it's also very well suited for
longer things like books or theses. There are zillions of LaTeX
extension packages, so it's possible to put figures into documents
using only LaTeX commands, or embed PostScript files, or create a
two-column paper, and so on. There's also the advantage that pretty
much anyone with a suitably modern system can process the LaTeX source
and get a similar-to-identical output file.
In contrast, my impression is that SGML/XML tools are still very much
evolving; if you're using, say, DocBook, the O'Reilly book is the only
printed documentation, and it covers DocBook 3.x, which has some
noticable differences from DocBook 4.x (and doesn't cover any of the
newer XML extensions). It's harder (at least right now) to make a
document look the way you want to; if you're using SGML, you need to
find the DSSSL documentation, and drudge through it, and refresh your
Scheme. XML formatting uses something called XSL, which is a
stylesheet language based on XML. IMHO XML is a little klunky
syntax-wise to actually write by hand.
The XML tools in Debian are also not-quite-there. The standard thing
to do seems to be to apply an XSL style sheet to an XML file (via
xsltproc) to produce a flow object file, but then it's hard to turn
that file into something printable (the only tool seems to be fop,
which is a Java program, which Debian doesn't support well, and the
current version in unstable doesn't work).
I think for now I'd recommend documenting in LaTeX; the tools are more
"there", and it's easier to find a guru if you need one. (My corner
of MIT has two SGML people; I don't know whether I'd consider the
other one a "guru", but I'm not one. There are lots of LaTeX people,
several of whom could be considered TeXperts.) Conceptually, I do
like DocBook, but I'd wait for the tools to mature a bit more before
actually writing anything serious using it.
--
David Maze dmaze@debian.org http://people.debian.org/~dmaze/
"Theoretical politics is interesting. Politicking should be illegal."
-- Abra Mitchell
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