Re: [dev] A lightwieight and working typesetting system.

On Wed, Sep 02, 2009 at 01:56:38PM +0200, QUINTIN Guillaume wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Do you guys know a (working) typesetting system other than latex ?

After years of WYSIWIG and a good deal of Latex (and unconvincing
attemps at WYSIWIG Latex, i.e. Lyx, and useless Latex IDEs that bring
nothing over vim/emacs), I ended up wondering if DocBook is so evil after
all. I mean, not saying that DocBook toolchains are easily procured for
multiple Unix variants, but no 2 installations of Latex have the same
packages so i end up storing latex styles inside my document sources
anyway, what a waste.

But my main grief is that Latex and CTAN are a mess of presentation- and
semantic-level mark-up.

Thus, just like you seem to be doing, I hunted for simpler stuff:
- Zoem and PUD, quite suckless and rather lean yet extensible thanks to
  being a Turing-complete language - which is wrong in my opinion, as I
  am rather sold to the stringtemplate philosophy of restricted
  languages. Down the drain, zoem.
- Markdown, small and simple but does not do that much and still a mess
  of presentation- and semantic-level mark-up.
- Pandoc, a more fully-featured reincarnation of Markdown in haskell,
  plus multiple output formats, still too presentation-level, but may be
  worth a look again.
- My current favorite is asciidoc, still a mess like the above, just
  quick-and-easy.

For me, asciidoc is a workable but interim solution: because it is a
mess that produces useful results, it makes me want to take a closer
look at plain DocBook - but that is a whole lot more of work than
learning asciidoc. No silver bullets, I guess.

Since I cite DocBook and your question is about actual implementations
rather than formats, know that DocBook toolchains are many and there is
a great deal in the freely available books "DocBook: the definitive
guide" and "DocBook XSL: the definitive guide", and the DocBook
demystification howto by Eric Raymond.

> And a good soft to make presentations ?

Assuming you dismissed latex-beamer, and want a batch system, s5 is
good. I am impressed at the output capabilities of s5 with a plain web
browser. I have yet to look at docbook-slides.

Cheers,

-- 
Benoit Triquet <benoit.triquet at gmail.com>
 .''`.
: :' :      We are debian.org. Lower your prices, surrender your code.
`. `'       We will add your hardware and software distinctiveness to
  `-        our own. Resistance is futile.