On Wed, 2005/04/06 (MDT), <fenner@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Well, I think the main reason is that any time we needed custom handling for a topic it was easy to write a macro to handle it; the same thing in XML would probably mean adding preprocessors (perhaps an xsl transform).
Yes, I use preprocessors (though not XSLT). I think that writing a preprocessor is equivalent to writing marcos. Some people can write XML preprocessors faster than nroff macros and vice versa, naturally.
We also ended up with some tables that required some pretty fine tuning to get to fit in 7x characters; my gut tells me that would be harder to do in XML.
That depends, I think. If you typeset your table manually, then you can use artwork to include that into XML sources. You would have to call it a Figure then, I guess :-(.
If you use nroff to format most of the table except a few special places, then current XML DTD is not that flexible.
Finally, the optional figures in the postscript version would not have been supported by the currently available tools.
Very true.
Note that the last two arguments (and even the first one, to an extent) seem to be unrelated to document length.
Thank you,
Alex.
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