Subject: Re: jade/jadetex with tables (was: Re: jade/jadetex & 2 questions) From: Sebastian Rahtz <sebastian.rahtz@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Date: Mon, 24 May 1999 10:35:26 +0000 (GMT) |
Adam Di Carlo writes: > * some major DSSSL advanced features are not implemented, the > biggest one brought up to this list being the > complex-page-sequence stuff... one man's "advanced" is another man's "basic". multiple column output with floats and footnotes is (to my mind) basic functionality, and one reason why Jade/DSSSL cannot succeed as it stands. The DSSSL'ers claim to fame at present is that she can generate high quality print output, unlike the XSL'ers, but this only holds for a limited subset of documents (eg technical documentation which is probably as good in HTML anyway...) > * TeX backend may need a re-write (see below) .. > Sebastian, what exactly is your critique of it? AFAICT, the TeX > backend simply represents FOTs as TeX in the most straight-forward > possible manner. Even though this tends to stretch the memory limits > of many TeX implementations, the fundamental idea seems sound to me... it's a nice idea, and was quite simple for David to implement, but it is predicated on the idea of passing all the work on to TeX. Theoretically, you can program anything in TeX, but in practice - its very hard - its slow - no-one can understand it when its done - there is a dearth of expertise witness the TeX output of Jade. It is unreadable, the macros that process it are unreadable and incomprehensible to man and beast alike, its slow, and it has not solved many problems. If more work was done in the backend: - lots of people understand C++ and could work on it - the output could be made readable - it would be faster - we could solve some problems if you want an example, look at something as `easy' as font selection. if the the font family, style, size, etc were tracked in the backend, then just the occasional new font call to TeX would be needed. as it is, JadeTeX brings in the whole LaTeX NFSS subsystem to mangle it all, slowly.... Then think about space-before and space-after. Or rather, don't. If I was starting it now, I'd base a TeX backend on what James did with the RTF backend, and emit lower-level TeX. Sebastian DSSSList info and archive: http://www.mulberrytech.com/dsssl/dssslist
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