On Fri, Jun 14, 2013 at 11:15:14PM -0400, Jonathan M Davis wrote: > On Friday, June 14, 2013 19:57:52 Walter Bright wrote: > > > Interestingly enough, based on Andrei's suggestions, I'm writing > > > it using ddoc so that it can easily be converted into latex, html, > > > and e-book formats rather than being tied to any particular format > > > (I was going to use latex, but Andrei thought that a macro > > > language would be better as latex is very tied to physical print > > > and fixed layouts). It'll probably be the first book ever to be > > > written entirely in ddoc. > > > > This is just being a win all around! > > My one major complaint about using ddoc is the need for the $(P ) > macro everywhere, whereas LaTeX inserts paragraphs based on empty > lines. I should probably create an enhancement request for that (and > maybe even try and implement it), but I have enough to do right now > that I decided that I'd just put up with it for now. But aside from > the need for $(P ) macros, it's actually quite pleasant to work with.
I'm curious about how you manage to factor out / abstract away the niggling details of LaTeX, like the use of ".\ " after an abbreviation (to make it produce only an inter-word space, as opposed to the extra space at the end of a sentence), m-dash vs. n-dash, etc., some of which are quite specific to LaTeX but are quite necessary if you're going for print-quality typesetting. And what about embedded \footnote's? Section references? Do you have macros for all of them? Does it make it a bit cumbersome to type? > I do have to process the ddoc before giving it to the compiler in > order to generate the table of contents and index macros (since you > can't generate those with just macros), but since I'm using a D script > to do the build, that was actually pretty easy. [...] Isn't \tableofcontents enough to auto-generate the table of contents? Or are you talking about doing that for HTML output? T -- Talk is cheap. Whining is actually free. -- Lars Wirzenius