[Gllug] docbook vs latex

[Nix]

On 10 Jul 2009, Craig Millar verbalised:

> I have a small documentation project on the horizon and it seems like the
> perfect opportunity to hone my LaTeX skills. But I've been wondering a little
> about docbook of late, though yet to actually do anything with it. What would
> you use, and why?

LaTeX, because I find docbook horribly verbose. You don't get terribly
much control over the look of your document with LaTeX, but you don't
get much with docbook either!

(One caveat: these days, one wants one's documentation to land on the
web first and in printed form second. LaTeX can do that with the tex4ht
tool, but in my experience it is extremely wobbly and the output doesn't
look terribly nice. I'm not sure lout can do it at all. If you're aiming
for webby stuff, perhaps docbook *is* preferable after all. But nothing
beats the TeXs for printed output.)


I'm looking at LuaTeX with mounting excitement (OK, OK, so I have no life
at all). Lua is a lovely language, especially when combined with metalua to
provide macros like a decent language.[1] The ability to use that in TeX
instead of the horrendous TeX macro language beckons. We're nowhere near
there yet, but in time, in time...

Other typesetters I looked at recentlyish: lout has some interesting
ideas: its biggest downsides are near-maintenance-deadness and the need
for a radical overhaul to support Unicode/UTF-8/anything with >255
chars. If you really want to try out the weird, Ludovic Courtès's
'skribilo' is very seriously nifty (and can generate HTML output),
but pretty much requires you to know some Common Lisp.


[1] as the metalua author says, 'of course, Lua is a Lisp 1.'
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