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

[Stephen Taylor]

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 at vector.org.uk



2008/10/20 David Tolpin <david.tolpin.xepng at 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
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.renderx.com/pipermail/xep-support/attachments/20081020/362fda9b/attachment.html>