On Wed, Sep 02, 2009 at 01:56:38PM +0200, QUINTIN Guillaume wrote: > Hi, > > Do you guys know a (working) typesetting system other than latex ?
After years of WYSIWIG and a good deal of Latex (and unconvincing attemps at WYSIWIG Latex, i.e. Lyx, and useless Latex IDEs that bring nothing over vim/emacs), I ended up wondering if DocBook is so evil after all. I mean, not saying that DocBook toolchains are easily procured for multiple Unix variants, but no 2 installations of Latex have the same packages so i end up storing latex styles inside my document sources anyway, what a waste. But my main grief is that Latex and CTAN are a mess of presentation- and semantic-level mark-up. Thus, just like you seem to be doing, I hunted for simpler stuff: - Zoem and PUD, quite suckless and rather lean yet extensible thanks to being a Turing-complete language - which is wrong in my opinion, as I am rather sold to the stringtemplate philosophy of restricted languages. Down the drain, zoem. - Markdown, small and simple but does not do that much and still a mess of presentation- and semantic-level mark-up. - Pandoc, a more fully-featured reincarnation of Markdown in haskell, plus multiple output formats, still too presentation-level, but may be worth a look again. - My current favorite is asciidoc, still a mess like the above, just quick-and-easy. For me, asciidoc is a workable but interim solution: because it is a mess that produces useful results, it makes me want to take a closer look at plain DocBook - but that is a whole lot more of work than learning asciidoc. No silver bullets, I guess. Since I cite DocBook and your question is about actual implementations rather than formats, know that DocBook toolchains are many and there is a great deal in the freely available books "DocBook: the definitive guide" and "DocBook XSL: the definitive guide", and the DocBook demystification howto by Eric Raymond. > And a good soft to make presentations ? Assuming you dismissed latex-beamer, and want a batch system, s5 is good. I am impressed at the output capabilities of s5 with a plain web browser. I have yet to look at docbook-slides. Cheers, -- Benoit Triquet <benoit.triquet at gmail.com> .''`. : :' : We are debian.org. Lower your prices, surrender your code. `. `' We will add your hardware and software distinctiveness to `- our own. Resistance is futile.
