On Fri, 10 Apr 1998, Damon Muller wrote: > On this topic, sort of... > > I'm going to be writing a Masters thesis this year (ie. approx 30k words), > and I'm planning on doing it in Linux (drag myself kicking and screaming > into the Emacs documentation...). > > The possibilities I am looking as as to format are the ubiquitous LaTeX, or > the newer contender, SGML. I don't know any of either, so I'm going to have > to learn something from scratch, but I'm wondering if anyone has any > recomendations as to which is easier to learn and use. I do know a little > HTML. > > I know that SGML can be converted to LaTex and lots of other stuff, LaTex > to HTML, RTF all that stuff, so either would prolly be alright. > > Any comments? Anyone recomend a good starting point to learn one?
One thing you need to remember is that SGML is *not* a single type of document. It's a standard for defining content-descriptive markup languages. Each markup language is described with what is called a DTD (document type description). HTML is one such markup language, and so is linux-doc, so is QWERTY, so is docbook, so is TEI (a suite of them, really), and so are many many others. When you "author in SGML" you actually must author in an a single SGML document type. When you author in Latex, you can author in a single document class--report, article, slide, etc etc. It becomes much more complex in SGML. Each type of SGML document will contain different types of content structures: headers, figures, figure captions, footnotes, etc etc. These must be defined in the DTD. The advantage to this sort of markup is that your document does not depend on a single type of output medium or format. It's "content" is frozen like a prehistoric bug in amber. It's meaning can now transcend the ages and tell people a million years from now what you were talking about, even though their output systems and computing methods don't resemble our own. So, that makes SGML an *extremely good* way to store your documents. Your documents have achieved transportability and have transcended the barrier of platform-dependence. You still need a way to display your documents. SGML by itself does not deal with presentation of documents. However, there are several approaches that seem to work well: 1. FOSSI (File ouput specification: see www.sil.org/sgml/ for more info. Normally used by govt apps.) 2. DSSSL (Style Sheet Syntax Specification: probably more what you're looking for. Has various implementations. Check out Jade on www.jclark.com) 3. Choose a DTD that someone has already designed conversion utilities for, such as Davenport, HTML, TEI, etc etc. These are all DTDs that you can use with Emacs or whatever editor you choose. So, what would I use? It would depend on the type of document. I'd pick a DTD that had at least all of the structures I needed: figures, endnotes, tables, etc. Probably Docbook might be a good choice, just off the top of my head. From there, you could use Jade to produce TeX. However, conversion LaTeX isn't quite ready yet. Norm Walsh is working on it, I think, but he already has a lot on his plate. I don't think he's got it working yet. (Of course, now that I think about it, he might not be the one working on it...since I just remembered he's writing a book about the Docbook DTD for OReilly, and that could be what I'm thinking about--but he could tell you who IS writing the LaTeX conversion utility. :-> ) Then from Docbook source, you could produce HTML, RTF, TeX, PS, GROFF, ASCII, and probably even other output formats for display or presentation. So, that's probably what I would use, or something similar. Good luck! -- David S. Jackson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> <http://www.dsj.net> "Linux: Choice of a GNU Generation!" -----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK----- Version: 3.12 GTW/GL d- s+:+ a42 C+++ USL++++ P+>+++ L+++ E++ W++ N++@ o-- K- w--- O++@ M V PS+ PE++ Y+>++ PGP++(+++) t+ 5 X+ R-@ tv b++ DI+++ D++ G++ e++ h---- r+++ y++++ ------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
