Re: [Boost-docs] The beauty of LATEX

Subject: Re: [Boost-docs] The beauty of LATEX
From: Dave Abrahams (dave_at_[hidden])
Date: 2011-10-19 19:51:35

on Wed Oct 19 2011, John Maddock <boost.regex-AT-virgin.net> wrote:

>>> And I was talking about linking not extracting. The idea is that if
>
>>> you document a function in quickbook, you mark it with a function
>>> anchor so that it can be easily linked to. I've found that linking to
>>> functions by their symbolic name is actually a really nice feature. A
>>> documentation generator could insert the anchors automatically. When
>>> manually writing reference documentation they could be inserted by
>>> hand. As I said, I'm not sure about it because I can see a few
>>> possible warts.
>>
>> Well, let's see the numbers. Matias, do you have the number of
>> Quickbook+Doxygen docs available? If there's a high number of
>> DOx+Qbk, then I have to conclude that Quickbook now is too tied
>> to DocBook/Doxygen to be practically decoupled from its backend.
>>
>> What's the implication of this? Well, we'll be forever tied to the
>> nasty DocBook tool chain.
>
> Apologies for staying out of this (very interesting!) discussion till
> now, some observations:
>
> 1) What's the issue with XEP produced PDF's - is it something we can
> easily fix?  PDF formatting is quite flexible, it's just a question of
> getting where we want to be.... 

I don't know if it can be quantified.  IME nobody complains about the
ability of LaTeX to produce beautiful, readable documents.  In fact,
some people rave about it constantly.  FOP et. al don't have such a
great track record.  Why fight the tide?

> but of course the complexity of setting up the toolchain is a concern.

A huge one.  And LaTeX still has a lot more momentum than the
alternatives.  More people know it, understand it, have written packages
for it, have made it easy to install, etc...

I know Addison-Wesley uses LaTeX in house for publishing.  Do you think
we could say the same for the other toolchain(s)?

-- 
Dave Abrahams
BoostPro Computing
http://www.boostpro.com