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Don’t use Tex if you’re aiming for web formats. There’s technically ways to do it but I’ve never found it effective. There’s a few high cost options used by te

Don’t use Tex if you’re aiming for web formats. There’s technically ways to do it but I’ve never found it effective. There’s a few high cost options used by technical writers that are likely overkill for what you need (Madcap Flare is one I relatively enjoy). Sphinx is probably the best for what you’re looking for though: http://www.sphinx-doc.org http://www.sphinx-doc.org

aasasd 7y ago
I thought Tex could be used to publish to pretty much anything that's in use out there? HTML should certainly be easier than PDF.
- mikekchar 7y ago
  TeX is a document typesetting language, not a file format. It's really, really awesome for making documents that are typeset in a very specific way. LaTeX gives you a set of macros on top of TeX that allows you to abstract some of that stuff to a certain degree, but the underlying engine is for typesetting. HTML does not have the fidelity of TeX. You just can't do the same things in HTML that you can do in TeX. Just to make it clear, TeX is a real programming language, though with a truly bizarre syntax and grammar (I still love it, though ;-) ). Trying to execute TeX and output HTML is incredibly difficult to do with any kind of quality. You could take LaTeX documents and then write a completely different formatting system that output HTML, but at that point, you would be better off using a system that is intended to output HTML: like docbook :-)
  - aasasd 7y ago
    Hmmm. This convinces me that I should look into Tex and Latex soonish, as I can't comprehend why anyone would want exact typesetting for electronic-first documents in the age of varying screen sizes. I dream of the day when PDF is as dead as Flash, for I have dozens of PDFs in my reading pile—which I can't reasonably get to, because I don't have a 14" tablet or a printer and can't spend days on end propped in front of the laptop just to read through them. Meanwhile, practically all of those docs are two-column walls of text alternating with rectangular pictures, nothing more complicated than Markdown, and they won't be printed in a paper journal. But the authors felt for some reason that they have to employ PDF. I've been sermonizing for years that it'd be better to publish in HTML and, if the author feels like it, build PDF from the same source—and now it turns out that Tex is a one-track thing and I could just as well ‘print’ HTML to PDF! I gotta see what's so special about Tex that HTML doesn't look serious enough to the big boys.
    - mikekchar 7y ago
      TeX was written in the 70's ;-) The main reason for using TeX is if you want to typeset a document that will be "photo-ready" for a print publication. Quite frequently it is for typesetting scientific papers (which is why it is popular with academics). Like I said, TeX is a typesetting language. It is literally a programming language that takes typesetting programs (including the data) and outputs an exact photo-ready output. It's very easy to convert the photo-ready output to a PDF, or a PNG, or GIF, SVG, etc. Because TeX is a programming language, you can write macros (there are no functions in TeX). These macros work on input you give it. In the old, old days, someone would create a set of macros for typesetting documents for each of the major journals and publications you might want to publish to. Eventually, a guy name Leslie Lamport wrote a whole set of really good macros called LaTeX that would allow you to write documents in a consistent way for a whole bunch of different types of publications. That way you could minimally change the document and resubmit it to a different publisher. So why do people still you TeX? There are two main reasons: First because there is still a need for very high quality print output. TeX is special in that it has perfect algorithms for doing things like line breaking, kerning, etc, etc, etc. The output of TeX is dramatically better than just about any other piece of software. It's insanely better than any word processor will output and there are probably only a handful of desktop publishing packages that are even close. If you need absolutely perfect print output, then TeX (and LaTeX) are a really good fit. The other reason for using LaTeX (not so much TeX, because typesetting documents in TeX is almost insane: I used to do it for fun, but I have never, ever in my career met another person who has done this) is for typesetting mathematics. The LaTeX macros for math are extremely convenient and the pictorial output from TeX are perfect. This allows you to typeset your mathematics in LaTeX, generate a picture and then paste that picture into an HTML document, or Word document, or whatever. There is one notable file format that is built on top of TeX that also is meant for digital use: Texinfo. This is the original documentation format for GNU. You can write hyperlink documents in Texinfo and it will generate TeX output for high quality print documents, and HTML (as well as a few other formats). It is very limited in its features, though and the HTML output is so-so, IMHO. There are a couple of other document formatting systems that output TeX as well (and in fact, I'm pretty sure there is one that will allow you to build some rudimentary TeX documents with docbook), but I'll let you look for those if you are interested.

aasasd 7y ago

I thought Tex could be used to publish to pretty much anything that's in use out there? HTML should certainly be easier than PDF.

mikekchar 7y ago
TeX is a document typesetting language, not a file format. It's really, really awesome for making documents that are typeset in a very specific way. LaTeX gives you a set of macros on top of TeX that allows you to abstract some of that stuff to a certain degree, but the underlying engine is for typesetting. HTML does not have the fidelity of TeX. You just can't do the same things in HTML that you can do in TeX. Just to make it clear, TeX is a real programming language, though with a truly bizarre syntax and grammar (I still love it, though ;-) ). Trying to execute TeX and output HTML is incredibly difficult to do with any kind of quality. You could take LaTeX documents and then write a completely different formatting system that output HTML, but at that point, you would be better off using a system that is intended to output HTML: like docbook :-)
- aasasd 7y ago
  Hmmm. This convinces me that I should look into Tex and Latex soonish, as I can't comprehend why anyone would want exact typesetting for electronic-first documents in the age of varying screen sizes. I dream of the day when PDF is as dead as Flash, for I have dozens of PDFs in my reading pile—which I can't reasonably get to, because I don't have a 14" tablet or a printer and can't spend days on end propped in front of the laptop just to read through them. Meanwhile, practically all of those docs are two-column walls of text alternating with rectangular pictures, nothing more complicated than Markdown, and they won't be printed in a paper journal. But the authors felt for some reason that they have to employ PDF. I've been sermonizing for years that it'd be better to publish in HTML and, if the author feels like it, build PDF from the same source—and now it turns out that Tex is a one-track thing and I could just as well ‘print’ HTML to PDF! I gotta see what's so special about Tex that HTML doesn't look serious enough to the big boys.
  - mikekchar 7y ago
    TeX was written in the 70's ;-) The main reason for using TeX is if you want to typeset a document that will be "photo-ready" for a print publication. Quite frequently it is for typesetting scientific papers (which is why it is popular with academics). Like I said, TeX is a typesetting language. It is literally a programming language that takes typesetting programs (including the data) and outputs an exact photo-ready output. It's very easy to convert the photo-ready output to a PDF, or a PNG, or GIF, SVG, etc. Because TeX is a programming language, you can write macros (there are no functions in TeX). These macros work on input you give it. In the old, old days, someone would create a set of macros for typesetting documents for each of the major journals and publications you might want to publish to. Eventually, a guy name Leslie Lamport wrote a whole set of really good macros called LaTeX that would allow you to write documents in a consistent way for a whole bunch of different types of publications. That way you could minimally change the document and resubmit it to a different publisher. So why do people still you TeX? There are two main reasons: First because there is still a need for very high quality print output. TeX is special in that it has perfect algorithms for doing things like line breaking, kerning, etc, etc, etc. The output of TeX is dramatically better than just about any other piece of software. It's insanely better than any word processor will output and there are probably only a handful of desktop publishing packages that are even close. If you need absolutely perfect print output, then TeX (and LaTeX) are a really good fit. The other reason for using LaTeX (not so much TeX, because typesetting documents in TeX is almost insane: I used to do it for fun, but I have never, ever in my career met another person who has done this) is for typesetting mathematics. The LaTeX macros for math are extremely convenient and the pictorial output from TeX are perfect. This allows you to typeset your mathematics in LaTeX, generate a picture and then paste that picture into an HTML document, or Word document, or whatever. There is one notable file format that is built on top of TeX that also is meant for digital use: Texinfo. This is the original documentation format for GNU. You can write hyperlink documents in Texinfo and it will generate TeX output for high quality print documents, and HTML (as well as a few other formats). It is very limited in its features, though and the HTML output is so-so, IMHO. There are a couple of other document formatting systems that output TeX as well (and in fact, I'm pretty sure there is one that will allow you to build some rudimentary TeX documents with docbook), but I'll let you look for those if you are interested.