<div dir="ltr">David<br><br>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. <br><br>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.<br>
<br>Stephen Taylor<br><a href="mailto:editor@vector.org.uk">editor@vector.org.uk</a><br><br><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">2008/10/20 David Tolpin <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:david.tolpin.xepng@gmail.com">david.tolpin.xepng@gmail.com</a>></span><br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">Hello Stephen,<br>
<div class="Ih2E3d"><br>
> We<br>
> wonder about the XEP line-break algorithm that put some truly awful<br>
> hyphenation in Vector 23:4.<br>
<br>
</div>XEP does what you ask it to. Set hyphenation-remain-character-count<br>
(<a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xsl/#hyphenation-remain-character-count" target="_blank">http://www.w3.org/TR/xsl/#hyphenation-remain-character-count</a>) to 3<br>
instead of 2 and mark up file names using a markup for which<br>
hyphenation is disabled, and the hyphenation will be good. With<br>
similar parameters, TeX will break in the same places, with this size<br>
of the page and of the font.<br>
<div class="Ih2E3d"><br>
> That might have been a mistake. Knuth considers typesetting a<br>
> finite problem completely addressed by TeX, and since TeX version 3, the<br>
> version numbers have converged on π. So perhaps there aren't any loose ends<br>
> to work on.<br>
<br>
</div>Current imperfect state of XSL typesetting does not make TeX any<br>
better. Knuth is stuck in the seventies, TeX is a good low-level<br>
glyph-placing engine, but it is not suitable for batch processing. It<br>
is an interactive tool without GUI.<br>
<div class="Ih2E3d"><br>
><br>
> Did you consider storing the LaTeX source and using the LaTeX and latex2html<br>
> processes to generate other formats from it? Or does your CMS somehow<br>
> preclude that?<br>
<br>
</div>There is db2latex that occasionally yields good PDFs, but has to be<br>
tuned, with quite a bit of black magic.<br>
<div class="Ih2E3d"><br>
> Any views on our production and archiving strategy most welcome.<br>
><br>
<br>
</div>The example you put a link to is badly formatted. But it is because<br>
the stylesheets it is formatted with are not up to the task, not<br>
because of drawbacks of XSL or deficiencies of any particular<br>
formatter. In contrast to TeX, however, where you will have to fiddle<br>
with every issue's TeX parameters, once you do the work on the<br>
stylesheets once, you get good quality forever.<br>
<br>
You just need professionally prepared style sheets to make the output<br>
look professional.<br>
<br>
Regards,<br>
<font color="#888888">David Tolpin<br>
</font></blockquote></div><br></div>