[Boost-docs] The beauty of LATEX

Subject: [Boost-docs] The beauty of LATEX
From: Joel de Guzman (joel_at_[hidden])
Date: 2011-10-17 05:35:37

Hi,

There's been a resurgence of LATEX usage, especially on the Mac
platform, thanks to TeXShop on the Mac, which started it all
and TeXworks (cross-platform: http://www.tug.org/texworks/).
This link:

  http://nitens.org/taraborelli/latex

reminds us how powerful and beautiful rendered LATEX documents
can be.

I am amazed at how mature TeX has become. XeTeX (http://tug.org/xetex/),
for example, is a free typesetting system based on a merger of TeX
with Unicode and modern font technologies such as OpenType or
Apple Advanced Typography (AAT), available for all major platforms.

To be honest, I've been quite disappointed with DocBook and its
ugly hack (tool chain) at generating PDF files. Perhaps it's
about time to reconsider other options for generating PDFs.
For example, I don't recall if we've ever discussed dblatex
before (http://dblatex.sourceforge.net/doc/) ?

Anyway, I guess if it still goes through the complex XSLT tool
chain, I'll still have my doubts. Another way is to decouple
the back-end of quickbook to allow it to directly generate
HTML, or LaTeX in addition to Docbook. Quickbook started out
generating HTML anyway and it should be reasonably doable to
refactor the code, decoupling the output generation. The only
problem I see is that some folks (e.g. John M), have written
Quickbook templates that leverage more advanced features of
DocBook. Those DocBook targetted templates obviously won't work
with a different back-end. Me, I avoided writing such templates
and going directly to DocBook because I didn't want to lose the
possibility to have Quickbook retarget another back-end.

Thoughts? Please, I don't need another "just use XXX or YYY
instead of Quickbook" answer. As its original author, I too
love Quickbook.

Regards,
-- 
Joel de Guzman
http://www.boostpro.com
http://boost-spirit.com