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Re: Summary of "New.." (About Jadetex)


Just a comment about my experience with Jadetex:

Working with Jade to TeX, and LateX or PdfLateX to dvi or pdf, results in
a good
quality output.
BUT: Perhaps at the beginning you need to check how a construction in the
DSSSL
stylesheet is translated to Jadetex. The problem is that you may get lost
in the chain: You
know the DSSSL syntax, specifications, flow-objects, and the like. Then
Jade supports
a subset of this stuff. Then it builds a TeX file you don't know anything
about it (I'm
talking about myself. I you are a TeX guru perhaps you are a able to
realize what is going
on, and perhaps you have also some LaTeX tools I don't know to help you).
And finally,
Jade uses TeX macros defined in Jadetex, wich have been built by another
person and
have other update cycle. So perhaps you find that a new version of Jadetex
solves a problem
you were looking to fix, but on the other hand, you lose some nice feature
that you had worked
hard to get. Again: If you know the TeX sintaxis you won't have problem
here.
My aproach here has been to get a reasonable good style for my docs,
avoiding things
that "could work now but not tomorrow". In exchage, I get the flexibility,
reusability and
faster updatablity of the documents that bring the markup language. I
suposse you can't get
the best of both worlds. So don't try it.

About problems with bigs documents: I have build documents up to 200 (two
hundred) pages.
Here the positive experience of some people with really big documents
would be helpfull. At
the moment there are only negative experiences. Are they conclusive?

Regards,

Juan R. Migoya

"Prikryl,Petr" wrote: (among other things)

> ----------------------------------------------------------------
> > Question on JadeTeX
> > ===================
> >
> > I am thinking about using (La)TeX for generating printable
> > version of the documentation and also the PostScript
> > and PDF versions.  Is the TeX back-end the usual way
> > for doing that?
>
> * It is usual way, but not the only.  Another way to
>   produce printed version is to use XSL stylesheets and
>   some FO processor (e.g. PassiveTeX). This tool-chain is
>   improving very rapidly.
>
> * Please check http://www.infres.enst.fr/~casellas/docbook.html
>   and see if it fits your needs. [The alternative
>   conversion tool to LaTeX, probably better for
>   mathematics.]
>
> * JadeTeX have some serious problems on longer documents.
>   For larger documents I personally generate RTF file by
>   Jade and then use Word and Distiller to get PDF.
>
> * The TeX backend attempts to use a TeX macro package to
>   render the output of JADE, resulting in good quality
>   typesetting for the printed documentation.  I like that
>   approach in theory, but haven't had much luck with it
>   in practice -- almost everything I print is done with
>   the RTF backend.  (The TeX macros are built in LaTeX2e,
>   BTW -- but unless you really want to monkey around with
>   them, you edit in the SGML/XML and treat TeX as a black
>   box.  Your previous LaTeX experience will probably help
>   in getting everything going, though.)
>
> (Notice: there is LaTeX3 project oriented towards SGML/DSSSL
> http://www.latex-project.org/guides/ltx3info/ltx3info.html)
>
> (Can anybody else confirm such problems with JadeTeX? I
> want to use it -- what should I expect when compared with
> usual LaTeX styles?)
>
> [snip]

> Thanks to all for now,
>
> Petr
>
> --
> Petr Prikryl, SKIL, spol. s r.o., prikrylp@skil.cz
>



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