Re: [Axiom-developer] Re: hyperdoc

[Martin Rubey]

Bob McElrath writes:

 > In the longer-term, do you actually want to run latex?  
 > 
 > I have been contemplating a pagetype which is faux-latex.  That is,
 > reads a handful of basic latex primitives and converts them to HTML,
 > whithout actually calling latex itself.  It would use itex (MathML) for
 > equations.  This can be feature-complete, but would be a restricted
 > subset of latex.  Also, it would not require latex/ghostscript/PIL at
 > all, if the user can view XHTML+MathML...

I don't know *one* mathematician who uses computers and does not have LaTeX
installed!

 > The other way to go is to actually use latex (or tth) to process
 > pamphlet files to html (or XHTML+MathML).  This route is slower (because
 > latex is slow -- and tth is very slow), but more thorough in the case of
 > obtuse latex usage.  Handling \def and \newcommand should be possible
 > for simple cases, but not the more advanced latex programming.

I strongly *strongly* suggest that you take this route. I said this before and
I'll say it once more: I suggest that there should be only few pagetypes
available:

* Structured Text with LaTeX

* maybe Plain Text

* LaTeX and Pamphlet being a LaTeX variant.

We can even forget about LaTeX, since a LaTeX document is a pamphlet without
code.

In fact, I don't quite understand why this should be difficult. Does speed
matter that much? After all, the document will only be reprocessed after
editing!

Again: Please don't do a fake LaTeX. Eventually it will fail, I'm absolutely
certain!

By the way, the aldor people also use LaTeX to document their stuff, but their
markup is LaTeX style (simple LaTeX environments), contrary to noweb. Well,
maybe it's even the same, only different syntax.

Question: isn't there automatic conversion LaTeX -> TexInfo?

Martin