Re: Re: No printable 7.1 docs?

Thomas Lockhart <lockhart(at)alumni(dot)caltech(dot)edu> writes:
> There is a difference between using techniques which markup content
> (DocBook, XML, etc) as opposed to those which markup appearence (latex).

Perhaps I'm stuck in the eighties when I did my thesis in LaTeX, but
I was of the impression that what's considered good style in LaTeX *is*
content-based markup. Sure, a LaTeXer may occasionally be forced to
throw in low-level stuff like a \pagebreak to get nice looking results
... but I fail to understand how this is different from the
output-oriented tweaking you do to the current Postgres docs.

> I'll submit that the time I take tweaking output for hardcopy is no more
> time that would be spent tweaking latex to get optimal appearance.

Except that the LaTeXer does it once. You have to do it over again from
scratch, very laboriously, every time you want to generate good output.
This is a step forward?

Bottom line: I see very little reason to believe that SGML + available
tools represents any real technical advance over TeX + its available
tools. In fact, if one wants decent-looking output it seems to be a
substantial regression. Perhaps it's only that TeX has more than a
ten-year lead in being developed into a usable tool, but from what I can
see from here, the SGML tools we are using are incredibly inferior to
what's been available for a long time for TeX.

regards, tom lane