[pdftex] PassiveTeX

[Rolf Dieterich]

Hi David,

> Why is this thread on pdftex mailing list not on xsl-list (which had a
> very similiar thread a few weeks ago) it appears to be completely off
> topic. It has nothing to do with pdftex at all.

Sorry for that. That's mainly because I've taken PassiveTeX as a sort of
preprocessor for pdfTeX.
Do you mean http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-xsl-fo/? On
http://www.tug.org/mailman/listinfo I haven't found an appropriate mailing list dealing
with XSL.

> You could probably fairly mechanically translate pasivetex's xmltex
> templates to XSLT templates then you'd have such a system implemented in
> XSLT. It's not clear what you'd gain though.

See, on my private machine I have an almost complete TeX installation. Being
an obsessive collector of software I have Japanese-Chinese-Korean support
installed though I don't understand one of those languages and I probably never
will. I have ArabTeX although with Omega it's much easier to typeset Arabic
texts. But for our business application I have a totally different ambition:
to keep the TeX part which is only _one_ piece among several others as small
as possible. Here I have an attitude which can not be overly TeX centered. So
I think it could still make sense to use an XSL processor which is already
on every modern Windows system (Microsoft also provides a redistributable for
MSXML if you don't have Microsoft XP, MDAC 2.7 or Internet Explorer 6.0). I
think it makes sense to use core technologies and software components which
are loosely coupled and could easily be exchanged.

In the meantime I've found out that I'm not the first person to have such
ideas and approaches, see http://www.ntg.nl/eurotex/PeppingXML.pdf. Probably I
should simply attend some meetings (DANTE) to be better informed. Projects
like texlib also focus on architectural aspects I am dreaming of.

> I can't imagine any translation path from any xml format, including FO,
> to TeX that would usefully go via Word. If you have a word document the
> usual FAQ is how to convert it to TeX, for which there are several
> converters none of them totally robust as far as I have heard, which
> isn't surprising given the different internal models that a word
> document and a tex document are encoding. why would you choose to go
> >from one text format to another via some proprietary word processor?

I wouldn't target this silly solution either. I only wanted to demonstrate
that there seems to be a lack of such converters.

Speaking of Microsoft, they haven't covered XSL-FO, have they? But I guess
some day they will offer some sort of FO processor - an ActiveX control
delivered in the "MFOC" (Microsoft Formatting Objects Components), with execellent
i18n support, with renderers for GDI, Word and PCL (but of course not for
PDF, PostScript, Java2D or AWT). So all the work I do now will probably be kind
of obsolete some day - at least for the Windows environment.

I learnt many new things in this topic. Thanks. For example that there is
SUN xmlroff. troff/groff is still alive!! Over ten years ago there was a
lecture on typesetting at my university. I never attended but I heard about strange
battles between the TeX and troff apologets. I think the war is over now,
isn't it? So we shouldn't compare TeX with Word but with Scribe or troff/groff
and ask why TeX was so successful on the long run.

Rolf


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