51–60 of 76 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I thought ConText was using Lua for scripting things. This suggests that: http://wiki.contextgarden.net/Mark_IV
you use ConTeXt over the LuaTeX engine. So it still requires Ruby and you can do Lua code.
As a typesetting aficionado, I have tried most of the suggestions here (Prince, Troff, Lout, Docbook XML, Asciidoc, LaTeX, ConTeXt, .. except GUI typesetting tools.) TeX appears bad from a distance, mostly from hearsay, until you have to write an actual technical book of certain expected high production standards and you realize TeX gives you the best shot at doing so. There is a learning curve. It is an investment o…
https://github.com/simoncozens/sile/blob/master/examples/ara...
https://github.com/simoncozens/sile/blob/master/examples/art...
https://github.com/simoncozens/sile/blob/master/examples/fra...
https://github.com/simoncozens/sile/blob/master/examples/par...
https://github.com/simoncozens/sile/blob/master/examples/jap...
https://github.com/simoncozens/sile/blob/master/examples/tes...
For a deeper dive, see the author's presentation at FOSDEM 2015 - I found it really amusing - from the starting line of: "I wrote a typesetting system - by mistake."
As a typesetting aficionado, I have tried most of the suggestions here (Prince, Troff, Lout, Docbook XML, Asciidoc, LaTeX, ConTeXt, .. except GUI typesetting tools.) TeX appears bad from a distance, mostly from hearsay, until you have to write an actual technical book of certain expected high production standards and you realize TeX gives you the best shot at doing so. There is a learning curve. It is an investment o…
Of recent attempts at dethroning LaTeX, there's also SILE, which actually reuses some LaTeX internals. For some examples of the output (hard to find, the author seems not great at marketing), see e.g.: https://github.com/simoncozens/sile/blob/master/examples/ara... https://github.com/simoncozens/sile/blob/master/examples/art... https://github.com/simoncozens/sile/blob/master/examples/fra... https://github.com/simonco…
Life: The other thing is that although one starts with grand ideas of being clean and orderly, by the end the process is somewhat of a mess, with a complicated makefile to keep it running.
It's sad that a complete structure writing/publishing workflow is still so hard. XSL-FO is awkward and limited, and will probably remain so. TeX is not design-friendly. On the other side, InDesign is mostly visual only. Framemaker seems to be only serious tool but it's very expensive.
I was a devoted FrameMaker user until Adobe killed the Mac product. I used to have to do fairly complicated legal documents, and it was worth every penny. Plus, it was a very good word processor--you never had to leave the program to edit text. So I used it for everything I had to write. A book like this could have been handled fairly easily in FrameMaker, but sadly Adobe has decided to position in it to be only for…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was a devoted FrameMaker user until Adobe killed the Mac product. I used to have to do fairly complicated legal documents, and it was worth every penny. Plus, it was a very good word processor--you never had to leave the program to edit text. So I used it for everything I had to write. A book like this could have been handled fairly easily in FrameMaker, but sadly Adobe has decided to position in it to be only for…
Hm. I never heard of FrameMaker before, but their 2015 release is available at $29.99/month, which is hardly "positioned only for large enterprises".
For anyone missing the lede here: the book is typeset in troff. This is astonishing because troff is 40+ years old and AFAIK hasn't gotten significant development in ~10 years. If it ain't broke don't fix it. http://www.troff.org/history.html
He answered that he still preferred to use groff, having tried alternatives. Since then I have used groff exclusively for writing documentation and papers. It never runs out of gas, and always produces attractive output. It offers a complete suite -- math, tables, pictures, graphs -- all in one package. It's fast, adaptable, and easy to learn. It has the highest ratio of text to markup of any typesetting system, including TeX and Markdown. It is the single most overlooked and under appreciated project on the planet.
Whether it's had "significant" development in the past 10 years depends on what that means. Current groff produces PDF format directly, without a Postscript intermediary. The PDF macros support links and TOC generation. I think that all took place in the last few years.
As a typesetting aficionado, I have tried most of the suggestions here (Prince, Troff, Lout, Docbook XML, Asciidoc, LaTeX, ConTeXt, .. except GUI typesetting tools.) TeX appears bad from a distance, mostly from hearsay, until you have to write an actual technical book of certain expected high production standards and you realize TeX gives you the best shot at doing so. There is a learning curve. It is an investment o…
Indeed -- XeTeX (and XeLaTeX) support Unicode and OpenType fonts natively (including system installed fonts). It's a pleasure to use.
Recently I've been playing with Prince [1] and I've found it to be very powerful with excellent support for paged media. Given that HTML, CSS, Javascript, SVG is used to build the document, it's also familiar to most people already. There doesn't seem to be any open source competitor to Prince though. [1]: http://www.princexml.com/
It also means your documents are locked to a proprietary standard that isn't that widely used (compared to say MS Word) and as such, may not be totally recoverable 10,20 or 30 years from now. You want to keep that in mind when you choose which typesetting system to use - for the record, I keep a digital diary that I intend should still exist 50 years from now. I use only markdown, and the occasional entry that mentio…
HTML and CSS?