Re: [xep-support] Re: [docbook-apps] LaTeX + formulas & equations + graphics --> Dokbook + MathML + SVG

From: Stephen Taylor <sjt@5jt.com>
Date: Mon Oct 20 2008 - 02:59:15 PDT

David

Thanks for the advice. Customising the XSL is certainly non-trivial, and we
are quite pleased to have got as far as we did first time through.

Getting a repeatable process in which solutions accumulate in the XSL and
the expert tweaking becomes negligible is exactly what we are aiming for.
Thanks for the encouragement.

Stephen Taylor
editor@vector.org.uk

2008/10/20 David Tolpin <david.tolpin.xepng@gmail.com>

> Hello Stephen,
>
> > We
> > wonder about the XEP line-break algorithm that put some truly awful
> > hyphenation in Vector 23:4.
>
> XEP does what you ask it to. Set hyphenation-remain-character-count
> (http://www.w3.org/TR/xsl/#hyphenation-remain-character-count) to 3
> instead of 2 and mark up file names using a markup for which
> hyphenation is disabled, and the hyphenation will be good. With
> similar parameters, TeX will break in the same places, with this size
> of the page and of the font.
>
> > That might have been a mistake. Knuth considers typesetting a
> > finite problem completely addressed by TeX, and since TeX version 3, the
> > version numbers have converged on π. So perhaps there aren't any loose
> ends
> > to work on.
>
> Current imperfect state of XSL typesetting does not make TeX any
> better. Knuth is stuck in the seventies, TeX is a good low-level
> glyph-placing engine, but it is not suitable for batch processing. It
> is an interactive tool without GUI.
>
> >
> > Did you consider storing the LaTeX source and using the LaTeX and
> latex2html
> > processes to generate other formats from it? Or does your CMS somehow
> > preclude that?
>
> There is db2latex that occasionally yields good PDFs, but has to be
> tuned, with quite a bit of black magic.
>
> > Any views on our production and archiving strategy most welcome.
> >
>
> The example you put a link to is badly formatted. But it is because
> the stylesheets it is formatted with are not up to the task, not
> because of drawbacks of XSL or deficiencies of any particular
> formatter. In contrast to TeX, however, where you will have to fiddle
> with every issue's TeX parameters, once you do the work on the
> stylesheets once, you get good quality forever.
>
> You just need professionally prepared style sheets to make the output
> look professional.
>
> Regards,
> David Tolpin
>
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Received on Mon Oct 20 04:23:41 2008

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