Heirloom troff supports OpenType and OpenType features. I still haven't found time to look into it, but it sounds awesome.
Brian Kernighan on the Typesetting of “The Go Programming Language” Book
21–30 of 76 posts
Re: Brian Kernighan on the Typesetting of “The Go Programming Language” Book
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
XML may have been made for documents but it is certainly one of the worst language families ever for actually typing documents by hand.
What would you use instead that would allow you to define your own markup? LaTeX? \em{Hello} isn't much better than Hello .
On non-English keyboards it is even worse.
Re: Brian Kernighan on the Typesetting of “The Go Programming Language” Book
#23Written in XML?! That's the first I've heard. Though also a fine proof that what you're writing is much more important than how you're writing it. (Still, though -- XML?)
Why not XML? XML was made for documents, they were writing a document.
Also, XML + XSLT gives you the capability to easily transform your original to other formats.
Re: Brian Kernighan on the Typesetting of “The Go Programming Language” Book
#24Recently 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/
I want to echo the support for Prince here, even though it's not open-source it is a very useful piece of software. I create web-based art books at a museum[1], and Prince has allowed us to generate high-quality PDFs[2] and even print-on-demand editions of the same book for very little additional effort. Full-bleed images, roman numeral page numbers, footnotes, multi-column text pages, all are possible through CSS.
In a past life I was a print designer relying on Adobe software for everything, and it is tremendously liberating to be able to leave that world of vendor-lock-in behind (InDesign has a nasty habit of making each new version's files incompatible with previous ones). So compared to where I'm coming from, Prince (even as proprietary software) is a big step forward because it allows me to work in open formats.
[1]: http://www.getty.edu/publications/romanmosaics
[2][PDF, 8MB]: http://www.getty.edu/publications/romanmosaics/assets/downlo...
Re: Brian Kernighan on the Typesetting of “The Go Programming Language” Book
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why not XML? XML was made for documents, they were writing a document.
XML may have been made for documents but it is certainly one of the worst language families ever for actually typing documents by hand.
Millions of websites are made with writing HTML by hand and it's certainly not that bad.
Re: Brian Kernighan on the Typesetting of “The Go Programming Language” Book
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why not XML? XML was made for documents, they were writing a document.
XML may have been made for documents but it is certainly one of the worst language families ever for actually typing documents by hand.
You don't have to write the XML tags while you type. The hardest part about writing long-form technical prose is writing long-form technical prose. You can concentrate on getting that right, in the editor of your choosing, using placeholders for diagrams and layout elements. Then, in a second pass, mark the text up.
Re: Brian Kernighan on the Typesetting of “The Go Programming Language” Book
#27As 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…
Sadly I have to work in Windows at times. Context seems to not be the most supported Windows platform. (The link to the Windows simplified package is 404) There is a New Installer http://wiki.contextgarden.net/Windows_Installation_new which does not contain a working binary. The only way to find anything for windows leads to a tar file.
I still think there is a better way to do typesetting in 2016 but all I have seen are a bunch of smaller projects without much support.
Personally I would love a markup language redefined with built in PDF-X support and a simple infrastructure. Context is Ruby, Tex, and ConText. I find LaTex to work well (for the most part) but it is not very flexible but I found the MikText Package Manager as a big step forward.
Re: Brian Kernighan on the Typesetting of “The Go Programming Language” Book
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
XML may have been made for documents but it is certainly one of the worst language families ever for actually typing documents by hand.
What would you use instead that would allow you to define your own markup? LaTeX? \em{Hello} isn't much better than Hello .
Sure, a single small example looks almost (but not quite) as bad, but in larger texts LaTeX is basically the text-you're-writing, plus some control stuff, whereas XML interferes with everything.
Re: Brian Kernighan on the Typesetting of “The Go Programming Language” Book
#29As 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…
Sadly I have to work in Windows at times. Context seems to not be the most supported Windows platform. (The link to the Windows simplified package is 404) There is a New Installer http://wiki.contextgarden.net/Windows_Installation_new which does not contain a working binary. The only way to find anything for windows leads to a tar file. I still think there is a better way to do typesetting in 2016 but all I have seen…
I wonder if it works under the new Linux subsystem.
Re: Brian Kernighan on the Typesetting of “The Go Programming Language” Book
#30As 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…
Care to comment on the reasons for using ConTeXt versus LaTeX? I've been curious about ConTeXt for a while, but I fall back on LaTeX out of familiarity (and the need to use provided document classes.)