[pdftex] PassiveTeX

[Sebastian Rahtz]

On Wed, 2003-03-19 at 10:35, Rolf Dieterich wrote:
> 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.

presumably because TeX and XSL are entirely different subjects :-}

> 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

Simon Pepping's work on directly parsing Docbook with ConTeXt
is highly relevant to this discussion. If that sort of approach
suits your problem, I recommend it. Much less work than XSL

> 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). 

They don't show any sign of interest in XSL FO. Historically, its not
their area. Personally, I hope the company crashes and burns as soon as 
possible.

> I learnt many new things in this topic. Thanks. For example that there is
> SUN xmlroff. troff/groff is still alive!! 

I am not sure the two are related. I dont know why Sun call their FO
engine "xmlroff".

> ver 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.

Scribe was never marketed or developed well. 
troff could have won the battle,
but no-one ever understood the innards. James Clark reimplemented it
all, but he didnt extend it. eqn, particularly, was frozen when Ossanna
died, and I think it was regarded as unfinished. 
-- 
Sebastian Rahtz      OUCS Information Manager
13 Banbury Road, Oxford OX2 6NN. Phone +44 1865 283431