Re: Formatting mathematics

["Thomas G. Lockhart" <lockhart@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> A colleague and I are writing an engineering text, heavy on figures
> and mathematics.  We have a few sample chapters done in LaTeX, and
> need to decide whether to continue with that or switch to SGML.  My
> co-author is willing to learn to mark up text in either, but not both.
> I'd like to use DocBook so we can generate both HTML and print
> versions.

I'm certain that just about everyone on the list has more experience
than I on this, but I was suprised to discover that what I had thought
would be the preferred route to typeset output, TeX, did not work for
me. A couple of reasons for this:

1) TeX input seems to be the weakest of the supported backends. Tables
do not work, at least with the combination of tools I'm using. I get
large amounts of warning messages, and TeX shuts down after processing
~120 pages, saying that an internal hash table has reached a limit.
afaik, there is no workaround other than to make the document smaller.

2) but even if this weren't the case, for better typeset output you will
probably want to go through the document and clean a few things up. For
example, you will probably want to adjust a few page breaks and figure
positions to get things a bit prettier. The RTF output seems to be
better suited to this, although not perfect.

I have not exercised the math typesetting features, so can't comment on
that. However, I will say that I am happy with the choice to use
jade/DocBook. We have good quality docs in both html and postscript for
the PostgreSQL database project using these tools. btw, I used
Applixware for the RTF massaging...

                   - Tom


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