``A cold coding we had of it,
Just the worst package from TEXLive
For a document, and such a long document:
The macros long and the braces many,
The very pits of TEX.''
And the tables hard, badly aligned, refractory,
Misplacedomitin every\multicolumn.
There were times we regretted
The dependence on longtable, the use of pdfmark,
And the hyperref macros breaking our \cite s.
Then the authors cursing and grumbling
And using Macintoshes, and wanting their Framemaker and Word,
And the editor crashing, and the graphics corrupted,
And the setup.exe hostile and CTAN unfriendly
And the usergroups dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to work in XML,
Validating as we went,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.
Then at</tei.2>we came to the end of the process,
valid, with all elements ended, all IDREFs satisfied,
With an XSL stylesheet, and even a version for IE5
And three HTML versions already on the Web.
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
--stolen by Sebastian Rahtz