TeX, LaTeX and Friends

5:04 AM

Please let me know if this should be asked on main board instead: I have large latex file with many sections. Is it possible to tell pdflatex to make separate PDF file for each section (numbers of sections, toc, is NOT important to get right for now), or each chapter, on its own, instead of one PDF file for everything? Or do I have to split the pdf file myself afterwords using external tool?

I found this answer, which seems to say what I want. tex.stackexchange.com/questions/5228/…

leo

5:22 AM

Is it possible to separate the bibliography in two: one part of only links to webpages and one for all the other stuff?

a friend asked me

Alan Munn

@leo Do you mean separate out the references that are just to online sources or have the same references, but one with links only and one with the actual reference?

leo

@AlanMunn separate references that are just to online sources

Alan Munn

This is easy to do with biblatex. It's probably also possible with multibib. Here's a similar kind of question. tex.stackexchange.com/q/36028/2693

leo

@AlanMunn Thanks

Alan Munn

5:38 AM

@leo That might not be the best one; check through other biblatex + multiple questions and you may find something better.

Stephan Lehmke

6:55 AM

@josephWright I earnestly suggest using XML as syntax formalism for LaTeX3. Of course there might be a familiarisation effect, but @egreg's answer here for instance is completely impenetrable to me for its syntactic verbosity. With XML you also have verbose syntax, but you also have a Schema providing syntax checking, tool tips in the editor, and (if you use schematron) basic semantic checking.

And of course the editor will provide all mandatory parts of the syntax by completion, so writing verbose code is easy. Has AUCTeX already been extended to support LaTeX3? Has anybody checked whether this syntax lends itself to excessive completion?

Joseph Wright

8:11 AM

@StephanLehmke I'm not about to write XML as my main input form, sorry

@StephanLehmke If you go down that route, then you get back to the 'should we simply abandon TeX entirely' question. See for example patoline.com for an alternative approach

@StephanLehmke No one said that Yiannis's idea for an input syntax was a good plan, after all :-)

@StephanLehmke There's also the point that people expect us to continue to support the \documentclass ... \end{document} structure: if you say 'right, forget that, everything is XML' then you get 0 users

@StephanLehmke I'm also unclear on how XML would work with user-defined mark up in a document, but then I know very little about XML formalism

Joseph Wright

8:24 AM

@StephanLehmke Of course, providing a route to use XML is on the 'to do' list: that's a reason for the code/document level separation (same internals, different interfaces)

Stephan Lehmke

@JosephWright Ok, all these are compelling arguments ;-)

So I'll just wait until the new syntax grows on me with time :-)

Joseph Wright

@StephanLehmke Feel free to raise on LaTeX-L: I'm just pointing out that this has not been ignored :-)

@StephanLehmke Well the code-level syntax is entirely separate from the document: you can't code in XML that I know of

Stephan Lehmke

Still I wouldn't worry about people moving away from TeX. I have a pretty good picture what other engines are capable of, and so far no seriuos competitor seems at hand.

@JosephWright Not sure what you mean by that. XSL and DocScape are both languages with an XML-based syntax.

Joseph Wright

@StephanLehmke But I thought the code for DocScape was not written in XML but in TeX?

@StephanLehmke Perhaps not: I suspect the 'parse in one step, typeset in a second' runs out of steam with complex cross-refs for example

Stephan Lehmke

@JosephWright That would be the same for the LaTeX3 kernel I assume. But if I write a 10.000 line DocScape "design rule base" most of it is basically script programming (with code and data abstraction, recursion, loops, whatever).

Joseph Wright

8:31 AM

@StephanLehmke That is to say the DocScape sounds like it reads XML as the native user input format, but the 'back end' is in a separate language. (In the same way that TeX reads TeX for the user but is written in Pascal)

@StephanLehmke Design level is different from both document and code level :-)

@StephanLehmke Frank is the man to talk to about design-level stuff!

Stephan Lehmke

@JosephWright Yes, I notice "FO power users" moving to DocScape because of inherent limitations of the computation model recently.

Joseph Wright

@StephanLehmke FO?

Stephan Lehmke

@JosephWright "Formatting Objects", the document description part of XSL-FO.

Which is behind most "visible" automatic document generation systems, like Online Tickets, Invoices etc.

Joseph Wright

@StephanLehmke Ah right

Joseph Wright

8:56 AM

Checking up on some biblatex stuff, I found we have tex.stackexchange.com/questions/48400 and tex.stackexchange.com/questions/23832. The two are very similar: any thoughts?

I notice that they are linked newer-to-older, I just wonder if a link older-to-newer is needed

Hmm, perhaps the comments are enough

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