[XeTeX] XeTeX in lshort

[Philipp Stephani]

Am 01.10.2010 um 08:25 schrieb Tobias Schoel:

> Hi,
> 
> of course, any document has structure and formatting, even plain txt-files have. That's not the point. The point I made, and you wrote it yourself:
> - In TeX you explicitly  state the structure/format.

In TeX you cannot state the structure because TeX is a low-level typesetting system that offers only a few low-level primitives and a macro language. Macro packages such as LaTeX and ConTeXt Mk II try to simulate a generalized markup language using the macro language, but still there is very little structure in a LaTeX document compared to, say, a DocBook document.

> They don't use headlines and bold faces to give their document structure, they do it to give it Phluff, glamour, whatever. And when they enter their first headline, section title or whatever special element, they click at the little "bold"-symbol, then at the little number and change it to 20, then at the "centering"-symbol. And then, they think: that's not phluffy enough: lets click at "italics", "underline" and make it "comic sans". Ah, no I hate that font, make it Arial, ah no, make it back to times new roman. Hey, what about making it symbol or windings?

Who cares how a document has been produced or how it looks like as long as you can read its contents?

> Sure, you can create documents in a structured way by using tools other than tex&co., even by using ms office. But children and students can't. And if you want children to do, ms office&co. won't let you. Use TeX to demonstrate, to make clear as sky the difference:
> 
> structure.

I don't know why this discussion should be relevant at all, but no: there is nothing more of the so-called "structure" in a LaTeX document than in a Word document. Both systems support formatting *and* semantical markup. For most documents semantical markup is irrelevant, and for those where it's relevant it can easily be done in Word with things like  formatting styles.