> It seems to me that all of the other problems you enumerate are simply
> bugs in the doc toolchain. We've worked around them rather than tried
> to fix them because that was the shortest path to a result, but if Chris
> wants to tackle actually fixing them, that would sure be nice. Based on
> your comments here, my recommendation would be to forget RTF entirely;
> instead, work on getting out the kinks in the TeX pathway.
That is at odds with the current thinking of the jade/dsssl community
(which uses both TeX and RTF), but if someone wants to try it would not
hurt I suppose.
The problem with TeX output is that it is *not* adjustable after the
fact, and that the jade support for things like tables is not adequate
for a real-world document. The jadetex author had concluded that really
fixing it was too much work. Many of the original development community
has moved on to XML tools development, but afaik none are ready for use.
One might want to research the current state of the tools as a starting
point for improvements. At the moment, I'd love someone to dive in to
the RTF reference page problem; I can send samples on request :)
- Thomas
