[KS] Re: Windows & Korean question

Otfried Cheong otfried at cs.ust.hk
Mon Sep 14 22:59:37 EDT 1998


 > If you're considering using TeX/LaTeX for your documents, you should be
 > forewarned that TeX/LaTeX deals more with the final look of the document
 > than with the structure of its content. You would be wise to go one step
 > further and use SGML for a long-term solution to your documentation
 > needs. It takes some extra software and and extra step or two of
 > processing, but SGML documents can be converted in any number of ways in
 > just about any final format you want without going into the document
 > itself and doing lots of tedious, error-prone coding or markup by hand.

Dear Gary,

I don't know where you got this impression about TeX/LaTeX. It is true
that it is possible to use formatting markup inside a LaTeX document.
This is considered abuse of the language, and shouldn't be a reason to
immediately discard LaTeX as a document markup language.

A correctly coded LaTeX document contains no formatting information at
all.  LaTeX markup serves to indicate the structure of the document,
and style files would be used to determine the formatting used for the
different structural entities.  You can format a LaTeX document in
just about any final format you want without making any changes to the
document source.

Proper LaTeX markup can be translated to SGML, and vice versa.  Of
course, as you say, SGML is also a good and flexible choice for
marking up your data.  You would still need a typesetting engine for
getting the document onto paper.  I was mentioning TeX as a
high-quality typesetter that can handle all scripts I ever felt I
needed.  Even when I have data in SGML format, I still end up
formatting it through TeX.  I simply do not know about about any other
typesetter that produces the same output quality.

Otfried




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