[MPlayer-dev-eng] A Modest LyX/HTML Example

[D Richard Felker III]

On Wed, Feb 27, 2002 at 08:41:48AM -0700, Mike Melanson wrote:
> On Wed, 27 Feb 2002, D Richard Felker III wrote:
> 
> > Why not work in just clear LaTeX or texinfo instead? Requiring LyX
> > seems to be an unnecessary pain if other people are going to be
> > working on the docs too. Last I checked, normal LyX (as opposed to the
> > KDE port KLyX) also required XForms which is non-free...
> 
> 	You must have a very different definition of 'pain' than I do: LyX
> is the best and easiest document processor I've ever used in my life. I'm

Pain is installing nonfree software, especially stuff without source.

> a little ignorant of LaTeX and texinfo, but tell me, wouldn't those
> choices entail having the document maintainers learn a whole new markup
> language (or 2) and use a text editor in order to manually maintain the
> markup structure? Are there automated tools that hide the details of the
> underlying markup language so the author can concentrate on content? If
> not, how is LaTeX and texinfo better than the raw HTML that we're
> currently maintaining?

They are better because TeX was designed with minimal markup.
Paragraph breaks are just double newlines. The only real markup needed
if you're not doing mathematical stuff is section headings for
indexing, and optionally some cross-references for the hypertext
output (or just to appear in the text/footnotes if doing print
output).

The whole point of LaTeX is to focus on content and not on how to get
the computer to present it well. I don't really know much about
texinfo but it's probably the most widespread format for writing
manuals (whereas DocBook, etc are usually used for HOWTOs/FAQs) --
especially with GNU stuff which is entirely texinfo-based. (Not that
the GNU coding standards are good, but texinfo seems quite nice.)


Rich