[FM Discuss] Adding LaTeX to FlossManuals.net for polishing/ layout

[Douglas Bagnall]

Mani A wrote:

> My suggestion would be to do all markup in Latex or context and then
> convert to other formats.


It is plain to all technically minded people that we should be using
semantic mark-up, so variations of your suggestion are frequent.

What we miss in this reasoning is that there are several hundred open
source documentation initiatives, and FLOSS Manuals is the *one* that
decided to concentrate on ease of authorship and a culture of
participation over structure and processability.  Despite this, it is
doing OK.  If crappy presentational markup was such a hindrance, we
wouldn't even be on this list to complain about it -- the dozens of
books by hundreds of authors are inseparable from the awful html.

Regarding the question of html to *TeX conversion: I am unconvinced that
this is worthwhile.  Automatic conversion to anything is going to be
hard work, so we might as well convert to something that truly is a hub
format, like docbook, rather than repeating the same task several times
over.

Douglas