Re: Preaching DSSSL (Re: using LOUT)

[Rolf Marvin B|e Lindgren]

[Mike Dowling]

|  I too once enthused about SGML.  The thing that I greatly disliked
|  about LaTeX is that they made an upgrade to LaTeX2e from a soup of
|  files to be found at some CTAN archive.

installng LaTeX2e is very simple, simpler in fact than the
previous version.  one needs to understand what one does, tho.

|  TeX is an oddball program,  written in WEB, which serves only to make
|  it inefficient, and designed to be converted into PASCAL, a toy
|  programming language.

this is very misleading. TeX is very, very fast, and extremely
portable.  It was written in 1977, at a time when Pascal was a leading
language, and uses no extenstions at all.  TeX is available for any
computer system I've heard of, including NOS/VE and the Sinclair QL.

WEB is a variant of Pascal.  The most common UNIX implementaton
translates to C.

| It writes a superfluous file (name.dvi) to disk instead of writing a
|  postscript file to stdout.

With the obvious advantage that dvi can be converted to any printer
format, so the user is not restricted to having a PostScript printer.

|  Silliest of all, you cannot simply download a tar.gz file from CTAN;
|  packages are always a soup of individial files.

I haven't found this to be much of a problem.  in particular, with
LaTeX2e it's uncommon to have to use unstandard packages.

|  Ah, I thought, SGML is the solution.  It's a IEEE standard, and
|  upgrades will therefore be seldom, and hopefully more reasonable.

Yes, but SGML is Something Else.  it's not a typeetting language, it's
an information representation language.  It' nots designed for
typesetting, you need a parser and a typetting engine for that. B

|  But if you have very complex formatting requirements, then SGML lacks
|  the semantics for their creation.

it does not; it has all the semantics you need.  if your book is not
run-of-the-mill, of course you have to write your own DTD and parser.

|  In short, the purpose of SGML would appear to be restricted to those
|  documents with simple structures which one would like to have in
|  many, different formats.

SGML documents can have any structure you want.  Linuxdoc is _not_ SGML,
no more than HTML is.  both are _applications_ of SGML.

|  Specialised stuff requires specialised type setters.

SGML is not a typesetter, so this statemnt is nonsense.

--
Rolf Lindgren
address@hidden