Marcel Oliver writes: > So I conclude what I have been trying to say, maybe not so clearly, > before: We need a standard for portable LaTeX which is necessarily a > subset of the capabilities of native LaTeX. I think the strongest hmm. if you go this way, you may as well change the syntax, make it < and >, so that what you treat as LaTeX is in fact valid XML..... > is processed through a TeX backend. Also, this seems more or less > orthogonal to the goals of LaTeX3, because it is mainly a matter of > convention, and not of fundamental hacking in the LaTeX the program. now there i agree 100%, as I suspect They will too. > It is important to keep in mind that most of the documents that we > academics write don't go via a publisher. These are class notes, > informal exchanges, short reports, grant proposals etc. Most of these > are routine, but some are important and significant documents. Thus, my apologies. you ARE right about this. though I could and would argue that people who spend 3 days tarting up the look of their grant proposal don't deserve the grant :-} ........... > In short, the fact that most publishers cannot accept a carefully > prepared LaTeX file causes hours of proofreading on a level which is > below the standard of the submitted document. We have every interest > to avoid that, and I think that's the same for the publishing > professions... too right. i think the situation you describe is shocking, and I am ashamed of my profession. seriously. > > i know i sound like an evangelist, but XML/MathML/SVG really *are* > > designed to cover this sort of game. your SVG graphic will embed > > MathML markup cleanly. > > Again, are the necessary authoring tools available? Will it allow me > to easily typeset (!) my personal documents? have you actually *tried* Office 97 to compose your memos? Office 2000 will use VML, I understand. No, I dont use it either, but really, thats what most of the world `typeset' with. its not THAT bad quality. ..... > Would it be hard to write a script which takes an eps file, runs it > through LaTeX/psfrag, and converts the dvi output back into eps with > the same bounding box (preferably not using bitmapped fonts and > including only those fonts that are needed)? This way one could meet no. thats what i would do if i was asked to routinely handle psfragged documents. > Maybe one could even try to implement the equivalent of -Wall into the > LaTeX engine (or as a package) so that authors could check without ha. interesting idea. > If someone now says why not SGML then: The advantage of LaTeX from the > author's point of view is that it is a single platform for authoring, > typesetting and document exchange (where, I believe, the problems can ah, but see above. is it *so* much harder to type <documentclass name="article/> <usepackage name="amsmath"/> <document> <section>Introduction</section> <math>a+<sqrt>3</sqrt></math> <!-- or <tex>a+\sqrt{3}</tex> --> This is <emph>fun</emph> </document> than the \ and {}? then you can run this through "LaTeX" as you do now, but it has the benefit of also being XML to validate against a DTD (if you wish). sure, you cannot use \catcode tricks, but you do already accept the idea of a subset dialect. No, you don't have to lose \def entirely. Doug Lovell's TeXML (see http://www.ibm.com/xml) might be of interest to people in this context. My point is that "strict LaTeX" and "XML" are barely inches apart, really. I know They will agree with this too.... Sebastian