[lug] More LaTeX samples?

[J. Wayde Allen]

On 25 Sep 2001, Tkil wrote:

> TeX is, indeed, mostly a typesetting language ... with enough "general
> purpose" ability to have other things built on top of it.

Yes, I very much agree.  I think that TeX came first though, and may have
formed the foundation upon which the other markup languages may have been
built.  I'm guessing here ... perhaps I'm very wrong on this point?

> LaTeX, on the other hand, is much more structured; it's not
> unreasonable to conceive of a LaTeX to, say, docbook (SGML
> application) converter.  i know there are some LaTeX -> HTML
> converters out there.

Agreed, and I was thinking that there must be a LaTeX -> SGML converter
out there.  However, this morning I haven't found one, and as has been
noted, there probably isn't sufficient information in a LaTeX file to
simply create an SGML document.  The closest I've found so far is the
Euromath System <http://www.dcs.fmph.uniba.sk/~emt/EmSystem.html>.

I've had no problem finding an SGML -> LateX converter.

> generally, any document that has scoped semantic markup should have
> largely isomorphic representations across LaTeX, DocBook, HTML, and
> other reaonable markup languages.
> 
> languages that don't scope, or at least not gracefully (troff,
> whatever bizarre thing i used to use on ibm mainframes) can usually
> only represent a subset of the structure that a scoping representation
> could.

Yes, this is pretty much my understanding too.  I've done a bit of poking
around on the web this morning to try and get a better understanding of
these relationships myself.  For those of you who are interested, the
following URL's may be of some interest:

   http://xml.coverpages.org/sgml-tex.html
   http://xml.coverpages.org/publicSW.html#jadetex
   http://www.tug.org/interest.html
   http://xml.coverpages.org/publicSW.html#format

Oh, and I just stumbled across the following summary about the advantages
and disadvantages between MSWord and LaTeX.  Thought this was rather
apropos:

   http://carbon.cudenver.edu/~hgreenbe/courses/texinfo/wordvslatex.html

- Wayde
  (wallen at lug.boulder.co.us)