> Perhaps I'm stuck in the eighties when I did my thesis in LaTeX, but
> I was of the impression that what's considered good style in LaTeX *is*
> content-based markup. Sure, a LaTeXer may occasionally be forced to
> throw in low-level stuff like a \pagebreak to get nice looking results
> ... but I fail to understand how this is different from the
> output-oriented tweaking you do to the current Postgres docs.
That particular operation is the same, and done for the same reasons.
> > I'll submit that the time I take tweaking output for hardcopy is no more
> > time that would be spent tweaking latex to get optimal appearance.
>
> Except that the LaTeXer does it once. You have to do it over again from
> scratch, very laboriously, every time you want to generate good output.
> This is a step forward?
Not true. If you embed pagebreak commands *in the source* then those
breaks *must* be reevaluated every time the docs change. If content is
added or removed, the appropriate place for a page break will likely
change, so things must be tweaked again. From source, not from something
close to final form.
> Bottom line: I see very little reason to believe that SGML + available
> tools represents any real technical advance over TeX + its available
> tools. In fact, if one wants decent-looking output it seems to be a
> substantial regression. Perhaps it's only that TeX has more than a
> ten-year lead in being developed into a usable tool, but from what I can
> see from here, the SGML tools we are using are incredibly inferior to
> what's been available for a long time for TeX.
No argument that TeX is a wonderful tool. But it is trading one set of
problems for another, not fixing every criticism you have.
At the moment, my life will be easier without having to argue religion,
so I can get back to preparing docs ;)
- Thomas
