[Vimoutliner] Vorst dead end analysis

[Stefan Schmiedl]

On Fri, 19 Oct 2007 13:41:12 -0400
Steve Litt <slitt at troubleshooters.com> wrote:

> On Friday 19 October 2007 10:56, Stefan Schmiedl wrote:
> > Steve Litt (2007-10-19 10:15):
> > > Here are some things I think are going to be difficult (not necessarily
> > > impossible, but difficult) in the VO to LaTeX converter:
> > >
> > > Indexing
> > > Bibliography
> > > Labels and crossreferences
> > > Math
> >
> > I admit to not having followed the discussion, but why do you think
> > these are problems?
> 
> Let's take index entries, specifically the kind that extend over a lot of text 
> (the kind that has a pipe and an open paren). I see no way of doing that 
> except markup, and once you start putting markup in your outline, its 
> readability and usefulness rapidly declines.

Last time I used indexing, it amounted to \index{whatever} and running
makeindex (or whatever it's called) after a sufficiently high number of
latex runs.

Bibliography, IIRC is similar, just a small reference in the text,
while the source spec itself is stored in a .bib file.

\label{whatever} and \ref or \pageref are quite non-intrusive, too.

Math is ugly as always, but after a time, you get used to reading it
this way.

It looks to me as if you'd like to use no markup in your book-generating
outline at all. That won't work. As soon as you start tweaking the page
layout or line breaks, you'll have to. OTOH you'll want to do this in
your outline-source so that rearranging is still fast.

In this vein, otl2latex would mainly be a matter of generating the
"right" section headers and subsituting the body text prefixes. Leave
everything else to the user, he should know what he's doing at that
point.

s.