I won't try to cover any of the ground that John
McChesney-Young has
covered in his post, except to say that that is also my
sense of the
state of LaTeX right now: support for UTF-8 is still clunky, and Unicode/OpenType fonts are not natively supported. To judge
from its
website the promising Omega project seems to have stalled.
To follow this up: on at least one operating system, matters are rather different. In Mac OS X, there is a quite wonderful TeX implementation named XeTeX: go see http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&id=xetex. This does Utf-8 right out of the box -- CJK, Thai (with hyphenation tables even!!), Arabic, Mongolian, polytonic greek, just anything as far as I can see. It also seems to work nicely with OpenType font families, etc. It also works seamlessly with LaTeX, including some real tricksy bits of LaTeX (long tables, for instance, spanning many pages). I got this running from bare ground to making Arabic pdfs in about 30 minutes -- you have to install the full TeX, XeTeX, and a graphic UI, TeXShop (which creates pdfs straight out of the TeX, which is very cool), but all this is nicely explained on the XeTeX site. I don't yet know whether XeTeX works ok with the EDMAC critical edition macros, but there's no reason why it should not.
I'd have to say that TeX is still, after all these years, just the best typesetting system I have seen. I agree with Dan, that it is annoying in that appartently simple things (changing page sizes!) can be hard to do in TeX. But boy, does it make up for it in its power to make really complex, really beautiful pages. I am currently setting some 10,000 pages of a historical edition (about 9,000,000 words) from XML, and for a task like this, TeX is incomparable. We use our own transformer tool to translate the xml into tex source, and away we go (as always, we have to do dicy things like make up pages from bits of other pages mosaiced together, with lots of text bounded by empty elements, so XSL does not cut it for us). all the best Peter
This is true about TeX and LaTeX. There is no better typesetting available unless you go to high-end typesetting systems. And it's worth pointing out that even an implementation that doesn't do Unicode can still do a great deal, for LaTeX does a great job of positioning diacritics, and there are good IPA and Greek packages available. For the last few years of typesetting The Year's Work in Old English Studies I used LaTeX with my own font package and IPA and Greek packages, and I never came across a situation the system couldn't handle. It would be easy to produce a script to generate perfectly decent LaTeX code and a beautiful PDF file.
I must say, though, Peter, that this isn't the first time you've mentioned things that XSL can't do. I'm not sure I believe that it can't be done. Someday, when we've all got lots of time, we'll have to have a programming shootout. You can offer up a problem that you think XSL can't handle, and you code it in C (or whatever it is you use), and I'll use XSLT, and we'll see who gets there first.
Peter
Peter Robinson wrote:
To follow this up: on at least one operating system, matters are rather different. In Mac OS X, there is a quite wonderful TeX implementation named XeTeX: go see http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&id=xetex. This does Utf-8 right out of the box -- CJK, Thai (with hyphenation tables even!!), Arabic, Mongolian, polytonic greek, just anything as far as I can see. It also seems to work nicely with OpenType font families, etc. It also works seamlessly with LaTeX, including some real tricksy bits of LaTeX (long tables, for instance, spanning many pages). I got this running from bare ground to making Arabic pdfs in about 30 minutes -- you have to install the full TeX, XeTeX, and a graphic UI, TeXShop (which creates pdfs straight out of the TeX, which is very cool), but all this is nicely explained on the XeTeX site. I don't yet know whether XeTeX works ok with the EDMAC critical edition macros, but there's no reason why it should not.
I'd have to say that TeX is still, after all these years, just the best typesetting system I have seen. I agree with Dan, that it is annoying in that appartently simple things (changing page sizes!) can be hard to do in TeX. But boy, does it make up for it in its power to make really complex, really beautiful pages. I am currently setting some 10,000 pages of a historical edition (about 9,000,000 words) from XML, and for a task like this, TeX is incomparable. We use our own transformer tool to translate the xml into tex source, and away we go (as always, we have to do dicy things like make up pages from bits of other pages mosaiced together, with lots of text bounded by empty elements, so XSL does not cut it for us). all the best Peter
Peter Baker wrote:
I must say, though, Peter, that this isn't the first time you've mentioned things that XSL can't do. I'm not sure I believe that it can't be done. Someday, when we've all got lots of time, we'll have to have a programming shootout. You can offer up a problem that you think XSL can't handle, and you code it in C (or whatever it is you use), and I'll use XSLT, and we'll see who gets there first.
This might be quite fun! Perhaps we could do it in Waldo stadium some May.
-
Daniel O'Donnell -
Peter Baker -
Peter Robinson