[pmwiki-users] Bibliographies

John Rankin john.rankin at affinity.co.nz
Mon Sep 11 20:58:38 CDT 2006


On Tuesday, 12 September 2006 6:23 AM, christian.ridderstrom at gmail.com wrote:
>On Mon, 11 Sep 2006, John Rankin wrote:
>> - it's not the markup that gets you, but the tables (sometimes these
>>   have to go into separate LaTeX files), the HTML entities, the images
>>   (these all have to be converted), the print metadata (what font to use,
>>   whether the document is single or double sided, and so on), the
>>   equations, and such like
>
>Yeah... I can imagine that all these extras are a real bitch. One of the 
>strengths of LyX is that it has tools/scripts for converting images into 
>suitable formats. The whole package of files are then moved into a 
>separate, temporary directory, where LaTeX can finally parse the files. So 
>I understand that your wikipublisher is doing a *lot* of stuff more than 
>just generating a .tex-file. I assume you have to do all of the
>above...

We do -- and it means that the hooks are there to pick up a .bib
file and give it to LaTeX along with everything else.
>
>> - wikistyles are really, really hard to handle -- mapping styles
>>   to their LaTeX equivalents is a challenge that we only partially
>>   overcame (example: coloured text that contains a url can in some
>>   cases cause LaTeX to die)
>
>Is there some mechanism for definining the LaTeX equivalent of a 
>wikistyle? (Otherwise I probably wouldn't even try to support more than a 
>small subset of them). Hmm... maybe you could add a method that let's 
>people define the LaTeX equivalent of a wikistyle?

Well so far, nobody has complained, so it must be good enough :-)

AFAIK LaTeX doesn't have the equivalent of a style -- LaTeX has a 
philosophy that authors are concerned with structure and content; 
presentation is a job best left to experts.

My bet is that nobody would bother to define print styles, even if
such a construct existed. Wherever possible, I'd rather derive
the correct xml from the html style information. The wikibook DTD
does not have the concept of style either, it uses a <visual> tag.

So far, our experience has been that if you get the *structure*
of the output right, you can safely ignore most html style
information and apply the default LaTeX presentation styles to
the printed output. The results look great and, more important,
are easy to read. If the structure is inappropriate, no amount 
of stylistic gloss will fix it.

-- 
JR
--
John Rankin







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