[Zope3-dev] Re: [Zope3-checkins] SVN: Zope3/trunk/doc/security/SecurityTarget.txt - removed rst document in favor of latex

[Philipp von Weitershausen]

Christian Theune wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> * Stephan Richter <srichter at cosmos.phy.tufts.edu> [050420 15:59]:
> 
>>On Wednesday 20 April 2005 09:42, Florent Guillaume wrote:
>>
>>>Gaaaah !!!! Why oh why ? The document is now totally unreadable, except
>>>by reading a generated .ps or .pdf. That's not the way to go for
>>>documentation :(
> 
> 
> Ok. I should have made the change set come together.
> 
> But I don't consider LaTeX to be unreadable.

That's because you're a LaTeX crack. :)

>>Remember that this document has to be read by an independent third party and 
>>they want nicely layouted pages, which I think they have a right to demand. 
>>ReST can just not provide that, but LaTeX can. Also, for simple (in terms of 
>>layout) documents like this, they are still readable in LaTeX source form.
> 
> 
> Right. Additionally we have a couple of large and complex tables around
> that ReST simply can't handle. It's less for having nice stuff than
> having a system that can actually handle it. Also, very likely the
> document is going to be split in multiple files because it's pretty
> large right now.

I admire LaTeX's typesetting capabilities. I despise of LaTeX because of 
its missing content model. Nearly all semantic value of a document's 
contents is lost into some cryptic language that isn't even about 
semantics but about layout.

Having said that, I fully understand that people who work on complicated 
things (and the CC spec demands a certain layout from this document, so 
even layouting this *is* a complicated task) chose the tools that help 
them and that they can work with best.

Btw, for my book I used DocBook XML which is not about layout at all but 
provides a sane and easily parsable (it's XML!) content model. Using 
XLST you can go anywhere, for example PDF (first to xslt-fo and then 
with FOP or similar to PDF) or even to LaTeX (which is what I did for 
the book). But, again, it's a matter of taste, too.

Philipp