Re: Document Prep using Linux - Why not use HTML preprocessors?

[vinod@xxxxxxxxxx]

One could also use HTML itself for getting fairly nice layouts. The trick
is not to use it in "raw" mode, but to use some sort of pre-processor. 
You can define macros which can then be used in the actual text.

Though these systems are typically used to maintain a set of connected
web pages, they could also serve as means to maintain documents, if used
appropriately. 

If you want very fine control over the layout, latex is way to go. I wish that
the style and the content are truly separate. Many of the following packages
seem to aim for it, though the focus is on HTML display. These days it is 
almost a requirement that you have one source from which you should be able
to produce latex, html or any other specification. There are lot of standards
in SGML which already enable this. 

However my bet is on XML related technologies. XML allows you to specify the 
content using appropriate metadata elements which you can create yourself 
(using DTD). (For example, tags for author, sections etc. are indeed 
separate.). You would then use a XSL style sheet which defines a style - i.e.
a set of rules for transforming the original XML document into whatever
format you want. To know more about the capabilities, check out 
"saxon" - in particular how it can convert the XSL specification into a java
based XSL compiler to produce the output that you are interested in. 
(And also how this compiler itself is produced from its own specification in
XSL.) Watch out more on these technologies - one could have a XML to latex
translator in this way very easily. 

I haven't myself used any of these - it is just that I collected a set of
links on this theme to eventually maintain a set of web pages and documents.  
You could give your experiences on this forum.


Jamal
http://www.isys.hu/c/verhas/progs/perl/jamal/
A preprocessor with its own macro language.

Web Pre Processor
http://www.geocities.com/Tokyo/1474/wpp/
A preprocessor with its own macro language.

HTML-Plain
http://artho.com/webtools/plain_manual/index.html
Another preprocessor. This one has TCL/TK based GUI too for some subtasks.

HTMLpp
http://www.imatix.com/html/htmlpp/index.htm
Yet another preprocessor

FreeMarker
http://freemarker.org/
An open-source HTML templating system for Java servlets

WebMacro
http://www.webmacro.org/   
It is web templates + jave server side programming; helps in maintaining a 
set of related pages, with data extracted from databases etc.

Saxon
http://home.iclweb.com/icl2/mhkay/saxon.html
A XSL processor and java library to handle XML documents.

- -Vinod 

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