On Mon, 1 Aug 2016 23:04:25 +0200
Adam Borowski <kilobyte@???> wrote:

> On Mon, Aug 01, 2016 at 11:36:23AM -0400, Hendrik Boom wrote:
> > A case in point is asciidoc. It's used to generate HTML pages and
> > books. To do books it recommends other sofftware that takes about
> > a gigabyte on disk. Now the Docbook stuff and the LaTeX stuff are
> > necessary for producing books (i.e., printable pdf's) but if you're
> > planning on using it to generate web pages it's a real surprise
> > when all that stuff gets hauled in.
>
> TeX does far, far more than just "books". These days printing uses
> mostly Windowsish patterns, but, especially last millenium, you
> couldn't get a non-toy printer without postscript. And in my time at
> the university, any paper you read came in .ps or some TeX-related
> form.
>
> On the other hand, I see the TeX world isn't anywhere as popular as
> it was back in the day, so perhaps this Recommends could be
> downgraded.

Here's my opinion, based on 15 years authoring books for sale, using
LyX, which purports itself to be a front end for LaTeX...

TeX is a language made for layout on paper. LaTeX is a superset of TeX
enabling a use of a wider variety of fonts, and making easier many
things you'd want to do with paper.

Neither is especially good for describing a styled document not
associated with a particular output format. They're too wedded to paper.

You can't write TeX or LaTeX and easily transpose it to HTML or ePub.
If you anticipate your creation being viewed in anything but PDF (which
produces paper), TeX and LaTeX are the wrong authoring environment:
They're at best an intermediate stage.

HTML and ePub are more popular than PDF today. Xhtml is an excellent
native format for styled documents targetted at HTML and ePub, and it's
also a pretty good native format to convert to PDF via LaTeX.

There's no reason for asciidoc to recommend any TeX of any kind. It can
write to HTML just fine (within its limits). TeX is **HUGE**, and you
don't want it unless you need it. And any author using asciidoc with
the idea of outputting to PDF knows he needs either TeX (LaTeX
probably) or some ugly XSLT transform, and can install the necessary
stuff.

SteveT

Steve Litt 
July 2016 featured book: Troubleshooting Techniques
     of the Successful Technologist
http://www.troubleshooters.com/techniques