TeX qurestions, for anybody who cares to reply... .

[Alejandro Imass]

On Tue, Jun 8, 2010 at 11:51 PM, Gary Kline <kline at thought.org> wrote:
> hi y'all!
>

[...]

Just my 0.02:

I use LaTeX directly strictly for typesetting but not for structure
and content. In other words, for structure and content I prefer to
work in a higher level structure such as DocBook or any other
meta-model of a document, _and then_ transform to LaTeX for print
(physical) typesetting. This has _many_ advantages since you can keep
"the source" of your document in a high-level structure (SGML, XML.,
Wiki Markup, txt2tags, etc.) and more easily transform that to any
media, including print.

My personal preference is SGML and the DocBook structure, because it
more easily adapts to our need. I prefer SGML DocBook because XSLT is
still (and probably will always be) limited for the kinds of
transformation needed to things like LaTex so DSSSL is much more
powerful IMHO for that. Besides, the popular Norman Walsh stylesheets
are so well though-out for books, that he usually get's it right, and
they need very few tweaks to adapt them to your needs.

Anyway, the message is that LaTex is an awesome technology for what it
is: a typesetting system, not an authoring tool. If you keep you
source data in a structured authoring format, you can later use the
data per se, for example structured text searches, re-use of the data,
etc. etc. etc.

Best,
Alejandro Imass