[comp.text.tex] tex and sgml ?

emv@math.lsa.umich.edu (Edward Vielmetti) (02/28/90)

There's an announcement in the Feb 25 TeXhax digest
about the "SGML-TeX Conference" on 31 Aug in Groningen.
In advance of that conference I'd like to learn a little
more about how this systems are profitably combined together.

I'm interested in SGML from the perspective of its utility
in representing paper documents, as well as the searching
software (like PAT) that knows how to deal with this text
structure.  Besides, my brain copes better with <italic>
this style </italic> than it does with \it{this style},
just the way it works I guess.

--Ed

spqr@ecs.soton.ac.uk (Sebastian Rahtz) (02/28/90)

>>>>> On 27 Feb 90 23:24:30 GMT, emv@math.lsa.umich.edu (Edward Vielmetti) said:
 > I'm interested in SGML from the perspective of its utility
 > in representing paper documents, as well as the searching
 > software (like PAT) that knows how to deal with this text
I don't think PAT does anything of the kind, actually, unless you have
a radically different version to me. PAT accesses pre-indexed
text files very fast, but I see no understanding of SGML tags in
there. the fact that it was developed for the sgml'ed OED is beside the point.

 > structure.  Besides, my brain copes better with <italic>
 > this style </italic> than it does with \it{this style},
 > just the way it works I guess.
shame that \it{anything} will not actually work in TeX, isn't it :-}

i'd have thought that \begin{it}   nnnnnn \end{it} was probably a
better notation. but thats just an aside.

So far as I am concerned, any attempt to link TeX and SGML too closely
would be a bad thing. SGML is designed to express very generalised
ideas about the document; one has to get that document printed at some
point, and converting it to a typesetting system like TeX is easy and
convenient. but sgml should be convertable to *anything*

Sebastian

--
Sebastian Rahtz                        S.Rahtz@uk.ac.soton.ecs (JANET)
Computer Science                       S.Rahtz@ecs.soton.ac.uk (Bitnet)
Southampton S09 5NH, UK                S.Rahtz@sot-ecs.uucp    (uucp)

jjsf@gmv.es (Julio Sanchez) (03/01/90)

In article <SPQR.90Feb28093602@manutius.ecs.soton.ac.uk> spqr@ecs.soton.ac.uk (Sebastian Rahtz) writes:
>>>>>> On 27 Feb 90 23:24:30 GMT, emv@math.lsa.umich.edu (Edward Vielmetti) said:
> > structure.  Besides, my brain copes better with <italic>
> > this style </italic> than it does with \it{this style},
> > just the way it works I guess.
>shame that \it{anything} will not actually work in TeX, isn't it :-}

Well, \it{anything} won't work but you can do something like
\italic{anything} defining:

\long\def\italic#1{{\it#1}}

But, in the general case, you shouldn't because more resources are 
involved in dealing with the argument (cf. TeXbook, page 205). In some 
cases you could even run out of memory.

Julio