[texinfo-pretest] Re: Project: texi2latex

[vale.it at tiscali.it]

MathML is great, but unfortunately cannot be read by the simplified browsers (like links, dillo, blazer, etc.). Thus a MathML solution, in comparison to a plain html solution is less portable... (when I test texnfo I use a standard desktop pc, than a P50/32MB notebook with links, dillo and opera and finally a palmos based pda with a palmos browser - if the output is read correctly on all three systems it is OK for me, because it makes texinfo user indipendent from both hardware and operating system + software)...

A software which is free for personal use and not free for commercial use, called tth, does an excellent job in transforming latex math into plain html... unfortunately tth does not support division into nodes and it is not gpl (a very bad choice imho)...

The Latex possibilities is not a caprise... I like texinfo markup very much - it is very intuitive - but when it happens to you to deal on the one hand with different languages (italian, french, german, italian, bulgarian, russian, etc.) on the other with some very small but compulsory layout specifications like tex frames - it becomes very difficult to use latex for one document and texinfo for another one because of language constraints... and the fact is that texinfo and latex structures are not very far one from the others, at least 70% of latex constructs do find texinfo correspondences.

Wel, Karl... I found your name with reference to the WEB language, the one Donald Knuth used when creating tex... it was quite a surprise...

Cheers,


Valentino

On Sat, 18 Dec 2004 20:32:55 +0100
Torsten Bronger <bronger at physik.rwth-aachen.de> wrote:

> Hallöchen!
> 
> vale.it at tiscali.it writes:
> 
> > [...]
> >
> > regarding equations and maths and info: well, the trick would be
> > just to describe the math info cannot represent... as a matter of
> > fact the latex math conventions are complex but quite easy to
> > understand.
> >
> > \fract{1}{2+3} in Latex would be 1/(2+3) in info...
> >
> > and so on...
> 
> (makeinfo has to cope with {1 \over 2+3}.)
> 
> rms may hire an assassin for me(*), but it's very simple to do this
> with MathML as the origin.  This is true for all other formats,
> too.  So: Convert Texinfo to XML losslessly and create DocBook,
> HTML, and LaTeX from there!  :-)
> 
> > the real advantages latex would give is the possibility to pass
> > commands regarding the hardcopy layout as well as input and font
> > encodings, etc. if we could find the minimum common denominator of
> > latex and texinfo lexical structures it would be a good leap frog.
> 
> This is a very important point.  How do we pass layout information
> to the backends?  Plain TeX is clear.  DocBook contains no layout.
> makeinfo's HTML has a CSS hook and the single/multiple file switch.
> But can one pass layout directives to a "back-backend" like my
> texi2latex?  Or must they reside in a separate cfg/sty/whatever
> file?
> 
> I don't remember wheter @c comments are included into the XML.  If
> so, they could be used to transport meta info like in Postscript.
> *shiver*
> 
> Tschö,
> Torsten.
> 
> (*) Forunately, I am too unimportant.  ;-)
> -- 
> Torsten Bronger, aquisgrana, europa vetus
> 
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