Re: jade/jadetex with tables (was: Re: jade/jadetex & 2 questions)

[Adam Di Carlo <adam@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

>>>>> "Sebastian" == Sebastian Rahtz <sebastian.rahtz@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

Sebastian> Joerg Wittenberger writes:

>> days?  I mean it should take maybe $20000 to convince somebody to
>> spent half a year at it and I would actually pay a share of that as
>> I would contribute my time.  Who else?

Sebastian> me. 

I would like to see what James Clark thinks.  Honestly, I haven't seen
any sort of comprehensive analysis of what is wrong with Jade at this
time, and what priorities should be.  AFAIK, I have seen the following
pointed out, and this is how I would prioritize it:

  * some misc DSSSL features and operators missing (there was a patch
    submitted on this list which looked pretty good to me)

  * the proper DSSSL transformation language is missing (I'm not sure
    if this is worth implementing -- it would seem that DTD-to-DTD
    transformations are possibly better handled with XSLT, although
    for SGML users it would need to be accompanied by some SGML->XML
    conversions as well)

  * some major DSSSL advanced features are not implemented, the
    biggest one brought up to this list being the
    complex-page-sequence stuff...

  * TeX backend may need a re-write (see below)

  * jade is slow (is this even fixable?)

  * NROFF backend would be nice (note that James himself wrote GROFF --
     I wonder what James thinks about this. Personally, I think its 
     kinda low priority, since HTML -> ASCII with lynx works decently)
  

Sebastian> Maybe David Megginson's entire TeX backend needs
Sebastian> to be thrown away and start again. SOmetimes I think that
Sebastian> would be best

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...

Sebastian> maybe we should make TeX process the RTF....? may not be
Sebastian> that hard

Yuck.  I would think that would be pretty lossy...

--
.....Adam Di Carlo....adam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx<URL:http://www.onShore.com/>


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