Andrew McNabb wrote:
> I need to solve a weird problem, and I was wondering if anyone around
> here has any ideas.
> 
> I have to be able to spit out documents from a program/script.  These
> documents need to look nice as a PDF (printed out on paper), and they
> may include a lot of graphics and visual tweaks.  In the past I've just
> written out a LaTeX file, and life was great.
> 
> Here's the twist.  In addition to PDF output, I want to be able to
> export to a format that others can comfortably edit.  Good formats would
> be something like Word or HTML.  Ideally, the Word document should look
> as similar as possible to the PDF document.
> 
> The problems I'm seeing are that things like HTML are terrible for
> getting consistent printed output, and things like Word are terrible for
> exporting to (with graphics, etc.).  Also, I would like to spend as
> little time as possible tweaking this secondary file (I'll be sticking
> to PDF for the most part).
> 
> Does anyone have any thoughts?  I know this sounds like too much to hope
> for, but it's possible that there's some cool way to deal with this.
> Let's here some ideas, both good and bad.
> 

What you need is a good multi-modal publishing system. Independent Study
there on campus has been hunting for one of those for years--something
with a friendly enough interface that the profs writing content will use
it, but powerful enough that once the content is written, they can just
push a button and spit out HTML, PDF, Framemaker, or whatever else
they've got a template for.

In my experience, RTF can be a very adequate formatting tool--especially
in a Wurd environment. I don't know if there is a module for TeX or
LaTeX for producing RTF docs, but it would probably be what you're
looking for.

-Brent

--------------------
BYU Unix Users Group 
http://uug.byu.edu/ 

The opinions expressed in this message are the responsibility of their
author.  They are not endorsed by BYU, the BYU CS Department or BYU-UUG. 
___________________________________________________________________
List Info: http://uug.byu.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/uug-list

Reply via email to