[lug] Typesetting Programs

[Tkil]

>>>>> "Michael" == Michael Hirsch <mhirsch at nubridges.com> writes:

Michael> Thinking about all this a little more, and I think that
Michael> rather than going directly to latex you might want to
Michael> consider going to an intermediate form like xml.  Then you
Michael> can write xslt macros to convert the xml to latex, html, pdf,
Michael> info, etc.  The poin being that xml is designed to be easily
Michael> processed into something else, but latex is only well
Michael> designed to be processed into dvi.  Given that most of the
Michael> word processors are going into an xml format, you could
Michael> probably even convert to staroffice or abiword format pretty
Michael> easily.

Good point.  Note that XML is more a meta-language, really; in
particular, there is a XML-compatible DocBook DTD (which should
eventually become the "official" DTD; currently, "true" DocBook is
still SGML, not XML).  The DocBook book has some good information on
how to adhere to XML in the process.

The point I was *trying* to make (with, apparently, varying degrees of
success) was that the intermediate format has to be one with semantic
richness, and no particular ties to any one output medium.  LaTeX fits
most of that description, although humans can often "break the
abstraction layers" in LaTeX and start mucking with the physical
description of things.

Anyway, I agree with you in spirit -- if the data can be massaged into
a consistent, high-level, semantic, content-based markup, then the
rest of the task should be relatively easy.

t.