Advice Please: SAXON, Xalan, JADE, LaTeX, and XSL:FO

[John (EBo) David]

I'm impressed...  I have no idea what half this stuff is ;-)

On the LaTex, etc. I can say this.  Many if not most math and phisics
departments at major universities have LaTeX styles that conform to
their universities specific thesis/disertation guidelines...  If you are
here at ASU, you can download it from the math department.  I downloaded
a copy over a year ago and have been using it (either directly or in
modified form) for a variety of papers for my coursework.  You can also
find similar style templates for MS Word, etc.

If you're up for it I would like to get together and discuss all this. 
I'm starting to write my thesis in plant bio (ecological modeling) and
soon to start a second in computer science...  Depending on what you
want to do I may have a couple of different options for you.

  EBo --


Trent Shipley wrote:
> 
> Flow chart for Dissertation preparation.
> (Dissertation is in Cultural Anthropology)
> ---------------------------------------------------
> 
> 10 SGML + emacs + normalize
>    |
>    V
> 20 XML + DTD + nsgmls verification
>    |
>    V
> 30 (XSLT + (SAXON|Xalan))|(DSSSL + JADE)
>    |
>    V
> 40 (XSL:FO + WordPerfect|Word|?)|(LaTeX + latex)
>    |                              |
>    V                              |
> 50 (LaTeX|TeX)?                   |
>    |                              |
>    V                              V
> 60 (dvi)? <------------------------
>    |
>    V
> 70 PostScript
>    |
>    V
> 80 Fomatted hard copy
> 
> ----------------------------------------------------
> 
> As you know I am working on my Dissertation.  I am currently in step '20'
> and ready to start working on a DTD.  This should be pretty straight
> forward. I am anticipating few problems.
> 
> Likewise steps 60 to 80 should pose few problems.  However commercial
> documents are scarce for steps 30 and 40 so I am soliciting advice.
> 
> 30: SAXON vs Xalan vs JADE
> 
> 31: Has anyone worked with these freeware products?  How do they compare?
> 
> 32: I have done some research on XSLT and am pretty sure I can get the hang
> of it.  The _structure_ of DSSSL looks pretty similar to XSLT (historically
> the other way around, of course).  How much harder is it to use DSSSL than
> XSLT?
> 
> 33: How much will working with DSSSL help learn LISP/Scheme style
> programming?
> 
> 34: What will look better on a resume, DSSSL or XSLT?
> 
> 40: XSL:FO vs LaTeX (Yes, I know they aren't interchangeable.)
> 
> 41:   There are no math formulas in the dissertation also no color and no
> graphics.  There is lots of manipulation of block formatting, fonts, line
> spacing changes and footnoting.
> 
> 41: FO looks like it is more intuitive and more expressive.    Is this true?
> 
> 42: Is LaTeX likely to require a lot of tinkering to get *exactly* the
> result I want?  Will I wind up coding my own modules and working in TeX?
> 
> 43: The text is on young people in Jordan.  I will be using the standard
> Latin-1 characters plus the Arabic Unicode code page plus a couple of other
> Latin code pages plus a Greek and a Cyrillic code page to transliterate the
> Arabic.  It looks like FO has much better support for internationalization
> than LaTeX.  It looks like LaTeX is limited largely to European languages.
> 
> 44: I suspect that WordPerfect and Word can read FO documents, but I'm not
> 100% sure.  I can't find an FO to TeX or dvi or PostScript converter on
> SourceForge.  bummer.