On Thu, 10 Aug 2000, Tom Parsons wrote:
> The natural response to that is, "Well, you're trying to use HTML to do
> something it was never intended to do." But in fact, for Web pages
> there's HTML & nothing else. (I'd *love* to do my FAQ in LaTeX.) So
> maybe my complaint should be, not the shortcomings of HTML & its
> interpreters, but the lack of a generally useful formatting system.
> ("Generally useful" meaning, roughly, "like LaTeX.")
Sorry for the horribly delayed response, but I would like to mention that
many of us do indeed use LaTeX for our FAQs. It is by far the easiest way
to generate multiple formats without a lot of hand editing of each version.
Personally, I started in 1996 with plain text. After a while, though, I
really felt the need to automate things like section numbering, indentation,
etc. After considering several options, I ended up re-doing the whole thing
in LaTeX. While the intended end result was indeed a plain text FAQ, I
provide HTML and Postscript versions as well, just because it's so easy
to generate all of these formats from LaTeX source.
I have a simple Makefile that, from the LaTeX source, creates DVI and
Postscript files, an HTML file (using latex2html), and a text file
(using lynx -dump from the html code). The text versions that I have
now are at least as readable as the original ones were, editing is
easier because it doesn't involve constantly checking section numbers
and indentation for consistency, and having pretty HTML and Postscript
versions are a nice little bonus. latex2html isn't perfect, but it's
surprisingly good--it does indeed produce valid HTML code, which is
more than can be said for most HTML-generation software.
- Scott
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