Re: [Fwd: Uses of DSSSL]

[Taco Hoekwater <bittext@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Sebastian Rahtz wrote:
> 
>  > For me personally, there is also:
>  >
>  >   4. For automated (font-dependant) calculation of sizes of tables.
> i dont see how this is related to DSSSL vs Perl?

In perl, I can unpack TFM files to get character widths and 
read arbitrary rubbish from a TeX log file. I don't know 
how or even whether this is possible in DSSSL, but at least
I suffer from the same problem as David and you indicated:

Too much stuff that works quite good now to start reworking 
and hope it will survive.

>  >   6. Querying the typesetting engine. For any TeX backend to work
>  >      correctly, it needs access to the full TeX engine. In fact,
>  >      perhaps a TeX extension that reads DSSSL specs instead of
>  >      macros would be the best approach.
> again, how does this affect DSSSL vs (say) SGMLS? either way if you write
> TeX, its processed by TeX-the-engine
>
> I am afraid I go along with David M's reason #2 - I have too many
> scripts with a system() or an arbitrary `open' to switch them all to
> DSSL

Almost all of my scripts open a pipe to tex-the-formatter to ask
for the width of table cells and the length of pages, pageheadings
etc. I now see that all of these are basically the same problem.

Greetings,


taco

 DSSSList info and archive:  http://www.mulberrytech.com/dsssl/dssslist