[pdftex] PassiveTeX

[David Carlisle]

> That's mainly because I've taken PassiveTeX as a sort of
> preprocessor for pdfTeX.

It's not a preprocessor and there's nothing pdftex specific about
passivetex, it works just as well with tex. this list is not for general
tex questions, even if the tex implementation you are using is pdftex.
It's for pdftex-specific discussion.

> Do you mean http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-xsl-fo/?

well that would be more appropriate than this, but no, I meant

 XSL-List info and archive:  http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list

which is a very active list on XSL matters.

> I have a totally different ambition:
> to keep the TeX part which is only _one_ piece among several others as small
> as possible.

If your aim is to typeset multilingual, multi-format documents using TeX
then you are going to need a fairly up to date and full TeX installation
whatever route you take, whether you get xmltex to read an XML file
directly or whether you translate the XML using XSLT or something else
to TeX and then use a more traditional tex format such as latex or
context.

> I think it could still make sense to use an XSL processor which is already
> on every modern Windows system 

I don't see why you need to use any extensions at all. If your
stylesheet is written in pure XSLT then it doesn't matter if
it is run on msxml or a java system such as saxon or xalan, or any otehr
system. You wouldn't say your TeX file had to run on a specific TeX
system such as Y&YTeX of MikTeX , you would expect it to work with any
TeX, the same is true of XSLT.


> Speaking of Microsoft, they haven't covered XSL-FO, have they? But I guess
> some day they will offer some sort of FO processor 

I'd be surprised if they ever support FO, but it doesn't really matter
does it? They don't provide a pdf viewer either but that hasn't really
stopped pdf at all.

> I think the war is over now, isn't it?
Anyone who consults the unix man(ual) pages uses nroff. that's probably
more people than use TeX still.

David


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