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The Document Style Designer as a separate Entity
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Eijkhout, Victor Lenstra, Andries J. |
| Copyright Year | 1990 |
| Abstract | An argument for the need for a programmable meta format: a format that introduces a new syntactic level in TEX for document style designers. TEX has a number of characteristics that set it apart from all other text processors. Its unsurpassed quality of text setting and its capabilities for handling mathematics are some of the more visible aspects. On a deeper level, however, the extreme programmability of TE Xi s just as big an asset. Any layout can be automated to an arbitrary extent. (It is strange that The TEX book gives almost no hint of this.) The form such automation usually takes is what is called ‘generalized markup’. The person who keys in the text has at his or her disposal commands that describe the logical structure of the document, and as little as is possible of the visual structure. Document styles as they appear in L ATEXare examples of this. Here the layout is not merely automated, it is completely hidden from the end user. In particular, the same input can produce widely different output by letting it be interpreted by different styles. With L AT E X, however, the problem is the production of document styles. This is a major task, and consequently most people use either the standard styles, or minor modifications of these. Furthermore, L ATEX does not offer sufficient tools to produce even moderate variations on the layout of the standard styles. For scientific use of T EX one can become reconciled to this situation. A scientist should be more concerned with the contents than with the looks of a document, so if there is a format that offers all the tools to get those contents across to the reader, the visual appearance is of secondary concern. We may conclude that, for scientists, L ATEX fits the bill. When a document is not a scientific article, however, the inflexibility of LATEX renders it useless. The alternative would seem to be plain TEX, but there the objection is the long and slow learning curve. One way out of this dilemma is the ‘front end to TEX’ approach taken in The Publisher from Arbortext and Grif from Gipsi. Both systems present almost a ‘wysiwyg’ (what you see is what you get) interface to the user (the term ‘wysipn’, what you see is pretty neat, has been used), and allow altering style parameters via dialog boxes and menus. In both cases, however, programming the basic style structure and appearance is still less than trivial. In this article we describe an approach which brings down the complexity of programming a style to that of using it. We propose a front end programming language for style design, which is itself implemented in T E X. |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://tug.org/TUGboat/tb12-1/tb31eijkhout.pdf |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://www.ntg.nl/maps/05/18.pdf |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://www.ntg.nl/maps/05/18.pdf |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://www.tug.org/TUGboat/tb12-1/tb31eijkhout.pdf |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://www.ntg.nl/maps/pdf/5_18.pdf |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
