Re: [Sketch-list] proposal for tex inclusion

[Terry Hancock]

On Monday 07 June 2004 12:15 pm, Bernhard Reiter wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 07, 2004 at 12:13:19PM -0500, Terry Hancock wrote:
> > Anyway, the discussion is about making "real" TeX objects for
> > Skencil.  So we're sort of hashing out our spec, and looking for
> > useful precedents. TeX is not the sort of thing you rush into
> > without a clear plan. ;-)
> 
> Almost sounds like a discussion for the development list
> if it is getting even more technical. ;)

Guess I'd better join the dev list then. :-)

To tell the truth, I wasn't really so sure I would be willing
to work on this when we started talking, but I'm warming up
to it.  Basically, I have to convince myself that it will save
me more time than it will cost.

I have a big typesetting project I want to do that would be
greatly benefitted by this (maybe 10X savings in time?) -- I
need to typeset a book, and doing it in straight TeX is not
feasible (it's too richly illustrated), and doing it in Skencil
and/or Scribus is onerously difficult (and rigid) because of
the typesetting limitations -- either would make last minute
changes to the text devastating to the schedule, as tremendous
amounts of text could potentially have to be reset manually.

Combining the two would just be fantastic.

OTOH, TeX scares me.  It's old, it's big, it's written in
a special "web" literate programming language.  And although
it can be regarded as a (non-turing-complete) language in itself,
it has a huge learning curve, and I've only ever learned how
to do the basic things I needed from it -- I'm not a TeX expert.

If there's plenty of prior art that we can leverage, though,
I'm certainly willing to help write some "glue" to piece it
together, as I would personally benefit greatly from it.

Cheers,
Terry

PS - Sending to both lists, happy to move to sketch-dev if that's
the consensus.

--
Terry Hancock ( hancock at anansispaceworks.com )
Anansi Spaceworks  http://www.anansispaceworks.com