On 06/02/16 21:11, Robert J. Hansen wrote: >> Please can you expand on what you mean by saying that Org "produces >> lousy print output"? > > My big annoyance comes from how org-mode silently mangles i18n. The FAQ > uses UTF-8 encoding so that we can do the Right Thing with respect to > languages. Right now we only rely on it in two places (presenting the > Greek roots of the word 'cryptography'), but I can easily imagine it in > more; for instance, if I have to credit a GnuPG-Users contributor named > Aßman, or talk about Merkle-Damgård hash functions, or Vigenère ciphers, > or... etc. Crypto is a truly international field, and so we need to > expect/prepare for internationalized text. > > When org-mode exports to LaTeX, most internationalized text falls out > and goes boom. The Greek that's currently in the FAQ gets silently > dropped, for instance. This *really really annoys me*, because it means > that after I've done a detail read of the HTML version of the FAQ > looking for errors I now have to do a detail read of the print version > looking for errors introduced by org-mode's export filter.
Thanks for clarifying. I wasn't aware of these issues. > (For the record: yes, I know why org-mode has trouble with i18n export > to LaTeX. Yes, it's a hard problem. Yes, fixing it might not be worth > the effort. All of this is true. None of it changes how annoyed I am > by the bug, though.) Do you happen to have links to the relevant bug reports, or other documentation of the issues? Also, have you explored alternative pipelines from Org-mode to PDF? Maybe via ODT or Markdown, etc? >>> [Texinfo] produces >>> high-quality print output. It actually looks like a book when you print >>> it off. [...] > > I don't like the way Texinfo looks on the page. It has a very 1970s > textbook feel to it. Hm, you think it produces high-quality print output, but you don't like the way it looks on the page. Not a *direct* contradiction, maybe... ;) It's also deeply married to very specific font > families, and I think we can do a lot better. The world has mostly > abandoned Computer Modern Roman, even Knuth -- he's moved on to his > Concrete font family, for the most part. I take your point here, but I'd suggest it isn't a priority. People come to GnuPG for the cryptography, not the typography. So, Texinfo still seems a reasonable candidate. >>> Another option: Open Document. For obvious reasons we can't choose >>> Microsoft Word, but there are no liberty-related reasons to avoid Open >>> Document. >> >> Please don't pick a format whose documents do not begin life as >> human-readable plain-text files. That rules out DocBook, too. > > Open Document is just XML, so it meets your requirement of a > human-readable plain text file. Or do you really mean, "I don't like > XML, so please don't use an XML-based standard"? :) I've spent enough time hand-editing XML documents in text editors and specialised XML editors that I've come to regard many XML languages as not significantly more human-readable than binaries. Compared to Org, ReST CommonMark, MediaWiki mark-up, etc, they require much more mental overhead and/or editor configuration. Getting clean plain-text diffs from these languages, including from OpenDocument Text, can be a pain, which complicates revision control. Support for editing documents like this in non-graphical free software environments was poor, last time I checked. It's up to you, of course - and maybe you like that sort of thing - but I would generally encourage you not to inflict this upon yourself, let alone anyone else :) Thanks again, - spk _______________________________________________ Gnupg-users mailing list Gnupg-users@gnupg.org http://lists.gnupg.org/mailman/listinfo/gnupg-users
