Re: [boost] Reference documentation: one approach

From: William E. Kempf (wekempf_at_[hidden])
Date: 2002-10-31 09:45:10

Neal D. Becker said:
>>>>>> "Peter" == Peter Simons <simons_at_[hidden]> writes:
>
>     Peter> Anthony Williams writes:
>     >> IOW, both DocBook and (La)TeX can be used to write documents that
> can be transformed into whatever output you require, but the
> techniques are different.
>
>     Peter> The difference is that powerful SGML or XML parsers are
> readily Peter> available and work reliably, so you can trivially
> write any kind of Peter> post-processor to generate fancy
> cross-references, check for errors, Peter> inconsistencies in the
> _content_, and so on ... While you _can_ do all Peter> these things
> in LaTeX as well, it is a completely different level of Peter>
> complexity to actually do it.
>
> I believe the opposite situation is true in many environments.
> Particularly on unix and linux, LaTeX is pervasive and XML is spotty.

I wouldn't go that far.  I've yet to see a Linux distro that didn't have
some of the DocBook stuff installed by default.  *shrug*

But that misses the point.  The LaTeX engines aren't suitable for the
complex parsing tasks we've given as examples.  Not that they can't do it,
but it's going to take a whole lot more effort than the equivalent using
XML.

-- 
William E. Kempf