Document editors are nice but they have their limitations.
What is a good alternative to them?
I already know HTML and CSS and while they can do the job, they are ill-suited for printed documents.
I was thinking in learning LaTeX, because many scholars use it. But I wonder if someone would recommend another language such as postscript.
LaTeX is fine. You don't want to write postscript by hand.
I’m using LaTeX almost exclusively nowadays, at least for text documents (everything from CV over letters to manuals).
For quick one-off notes, I’m actually using Markdown (without a renderer. I just think that Markdown preserves document structure quite nicely even when used in text-only mode).
For presentations and spreadsheets, I use appropriate applications, though. In particular, I don’t think LaTeX is that well-suited to do the former (depending on your style of presentations, obviously. Mine have next to no text though …).
I finally got a chance to write an entire paper in LaTeX for my final semester of College and found it to be easier than I thought it would be. A couple of the nice things I found about it were
A fairly lightweight syntax for most things (tables being the only real offender, but no one can get text tables right).
An extremely wide array of syntax for doing anything from automatically marking up a chemical formula to writing inline lists.
Beautiful output automatically.
Extremely easy to write modular documents where I might store a chapter in a file and then simply \include{} it in another. One particularly nice use I found for this was to include code that I had written in the document simply by referencing the files.
Wonderful support for footnotes and bibliographic references.
Libraries for just about anything you can imagine.
The major drawbacks are, IMHO:
A lack of any real direction or life in the language. It feels dead, and not because it's done.
A frustrating build process, although there are tools to help with that, from a simple bash script to a full fledged make file.
If you're interested in learning LaTeX, I would recommend starting out by reading the Not So Short Introduction to LaTeX 2e PDF.
However, I decided against using LaTeX for most things that I write these days specifically because it feels dead and has a frustrating build process. I instead switched over to MultiMarkdown, as it is well supported and can be transformed into a large array of other formats, including LaTeX which can then be hand massaged if you really need to in order to get it the format expected by some publication. If you haven't played with MultiMarkdown or Markdown before, then I highly recommend checking them out. The syntax is extremely lightweight and natural, even compared to LaTeX. I find that except for some of the higher level typographical constructs, MultiMarkdown supports everything I need on a regular basis.
My 2 cents.
It depends on what you want to do. If you are planning to write a formal document, maybe for printing too, just go for LaTex.
Not difficolt as it may appear at the very beginning but professional and fulfilling.
If Web is your goal, go for HTML / CSS.
OpenOffice or Word would do the trick in most cases; do not underestimate them, if you are going to use them (example for job) take time to learn them.
To expand on zzzzBov's commmment, LaTeX is SUPPOSED to allow the writer to concentrate on the content and allow the compiler/documentclass to handle formatting (and that usually is true). If you use HTML/CSS to format you will probably be spending more time (rather than less) doing formatting. Imagine that the LaTeX documentclass is the CSS, only it is already written for you, and your LaTeX source is the content, only the tags are more functional (such as italics or equations) than for patching between the HTML and the CSS (<div ...>). I recommend the LaTeX wikibook as an easy way to start, and the short-math-guide, it if you need mathematics. Enjoy!
Related
I need to maintain many documents which need to be able to be viewed as 2 different types of format: PDF & HTML. The document will be mostly text, but may contain some images or mathematical formulas.
My current approach is to maintain 2 files for each document. However, this approach is tiresome, as if the content needs to change, I need to modify BOTH versions of the file.
I want to find a way to easily keep both versions of the file in sync. Preferably (but not necessary), the approach should allow me to use tools like git, or svn.
A solution that comes to my mind is to use latex. Represent the document in latex, then export it to HTML/PDF. This way, whenever there is a change, I need only to modify one file (the latex file).
But I have zero experience working with latex. I'm not sure whether latex is suitable for this, I need advice. What do you guys think? Is latex suitable for this task? If not, what alternatives do I have?
First of all,
yes, LaTeX is suitable for this (and it works particularly well with formulæ).
The main processing paths are:
Use pdflatex to create a pdf directly from LaTeX
Use latex2html or tex4ht to convert your LaTeX source to HTML
I am biased (having authored a text book for LaTeX in German language), but I think LaTeX is definitely worth learning.
restructuredText (Python docutils) is good for this. There are a couple of paths from text to PDF; one of them goes through LaTeX and the other one is a pure Python rst2pdf.
If you have a lot of formulas, it might be worth doing it in LaTeX, but restructuredText source is a lot more readable than LaTeX source.
Sounds like a good candidate scenario for working in markdown and using pandoc to convert to both LaTeX and HTML. Formulas can be essentially written in LaTeX (thus making the maintenance of that output painless) and the markdown-to-HTML conversion can be expressed with the --mathjax option to yield proper display in HTML.
I want to write a book on programming. I need to target both print and HTML.
In order not to get burned with the code examples, I need to be able to include parts of source code which have been marked up with start and end points to ensure the code is up to date and compiles. Extract the code from external files if you will.
I would like some simple format such as Txt2tags rather than latex since I then can use word's fine spelling capabilities.
Any experiences you want to share?
It is important to note that by starting with Txt2Tags you will be able to export your documents into LaTex. To my knowledge this is a one-way street, so by starting with Txt2tags you can still have the flexibility of LaTex, but by going with LaTex you don't get the benefits of Txt2tags.
Firstly, don't dismiss LaTeX too rapidly. Although it can be a bit of a pain to spellcheck, it's still quite doable with tools like aspell.
That being said, I would highly recommend using emacs' org-mode. It will provide you with a nice foldable overview of your book's structure, and is much more readable in plain text than LaTeX. Additionally, since it uses emacs' native syntax highlighting when you export (to HTML, LaTeX, PDF, etc) you'll be able to write the code inline (between #+begin_src tags) and get a much more precise WYSIWYG view of the code snippets you include.
Since emacs will work with aspell out-of-the-box, you'll still be able to check spelling as you work. Also, it uses LaTeX as an export format, which means you can obtain the same professional/technical look that LaTeX affords.
I see it has been reported as a missing feature on the text2tag homepage...
I'll ask my question first, then give some background for those who are interested:
I would like to know if there is a command in html that will automatically generate a bibliography from a .bib file? This means that throughout the text, i would add something like <cite name="Jones2010">, and then at the bottom of the html (or css) file, I would write something like <makebib file="biblist.bib", format="APA">, and a bibliography would be generated using my .bib file, and formated according to the APA style. The functionality would be quite similar to footnotes, except that each footnote is populated according to some script that extracts the information from (essentially) an xml file and outputs the content in the desired format. It is not difficult to imagine somebody creating a tool to do just that, however, my google search skills have not enabled me to find such a tool. It is easy to find tools that convert bib files to html or xml, but that is not sufficient for my needs. I do not desire to publish my entire bib file online. Rather, for each document that I generate, I want several of the entries in the bib file to be included as footnotes. Any pointers will be greatly appreciated.
Now, the reason behind the question:
I have recently begun switching from writing all my manuscripts using latex to writing them using html/css. The advantages of this approach are fast: only 1 file for versioning (instead of .dvi, .ps, .aux, .blg, etc.), it is much smaller to share, other people can edit the html file and compile it much more easily, it is more configurable to my tastes, easier to read on screen, etc. The disadvantage for me, however, is that while I've been writing in latex for years, I've only just begin using html and css for scientific document creating. The main impetus for the switch was MathJaX, which enables me to to embed latex equations in my html files, and therefore, allows me to combine the advantages of latex with the advantages of css. I imagine that nearly all my colleagues will switch away from latex to this simpler format, assuming a few remaining issues get resolved, like ease of creating bibliographies.
Many thanks.
What you're asking isn't possible, unless when you specify html/css you really mean html/css/php or html/css/python or some other combination that includes an actual programming language, rather than just a markup language.
I understand your motivation, I'd love to switch to html instead of latex! However, I suspect an html-based solution would involve so much extra processing added on top to sort out bibliographies etc that the complexity would start approaching that of LaTeX by the time you got it all worked out.
I'd be pleased to be proven wrong on this!
I've done this, in the past, using XSLT and BibTeX. In outline, the steps are
Mark up your document using some convention or other: I used <span class='citation'>Smith99</span>
Write an XSLT script to transform that file into a .aux file with \citation commands in it
Use BibTeX along with a .bst file which spits out HTML rather than LaTeX
Use another XSLT script (or the same one, in a different mode) to pull the bibliography in
It's not quite as fiddly as it sounds, but you can look at how I did it on google code. In particular, see structure.xslt and plainhtml.bst.
If there's a more direct way, I'd be quite interested to hear about it.
Both answers so far are somewhat correct, although not quite what you were asking for. Part of the problem is that the question as it's phrased doesn't necessarily makes sense.
HTML is just markup; you need something to process the markup, be it python, php, ruby, etc.
And you probably want to write in XML (or XHTML), not HTML.
XSLT may work for you (once it's in XML), but remember, an XSLT document that defines a set of rules. You would get an XSLT engine to apply your XSLT rules against your XML document.
You can create an html bibliography from a .bib file using bibtex2html. This package takes a series of command line arguments and extracts the info from the BibTeX source and outputs a file with html markup.
As far as I know you cannot get it to read and parse the html document like the LaTeX \cite command but there are several ways to indicate the references you want. I find that the easiest way is to just maintain a text file of the BibTeX keys I use in my manuscript and then call this using the --citefile option. There is also a tool called bib2bib included that will take search commands.
It is a very flexible package and there are a lot of options so it works in a lot of situations. For example you can get it to omit the <html> headers from the output file so that you can directly paste into an existing html document.
The documentation is useful but make sure you look at the pdf documentation file and the man pages.
I'm looking for a mathematical WYSIWYG HTML editor. So it has to be capable of producing well formed mathematical expressions like in this example:
http://www.blau-test.be/files/example.jpg ( the font really doesn't mather, considering it can be styled using css )
Pricing doesn't matter, but it can be free 2 offcourse. If it is , the creator can expect a large donation ;)
It should be capable of producing the most common math expressions available , if not all! It don't expect it to work properly on IE6 but IE7 and IE8 would be nice!
Mathematicians swear by TeX as being the most effective way to describe complex formulae to the degree that the'll often use TeX notation when communicating via plain text.
There are a number of different editors for different circumstances, but I've personally never seen a more concise, accurate, and on-the-fly modifiable means of getting idea to typography.
For very good WYSIWYG just fork MathQuill from github.
If pricing really doesn't matter have a look at Mathematica. It can export mathematical expressions in MathML which most browsers can present, either natively or with a plug-in.
Take a look at mathoverflow.net. They handle math markup very well. They use MathJax.
MathOverflow LaTeX support is MathJax,
a method of including mathematics in
web pages using javascript.
I felt someone should mention Design Science's product, MathFlow. I have no experience with the product, but the company has long been a supporter of MathML and related standards, and the products certainly merit some attention for a serious project.
On MathJax: The OP asked for WYSIWYG, and I'd argue that being able to quickly write out a math expression in ascii, latex or mathml and have it directly interpreted by a one-line script included on a page, provides as much or more immediate accessibility and feedback than a GUI interface.
I need to implement a simple and efficient XSS Filter in C++ for CppCMS. I can't use existing high quality filters
written in PHP because because it is high performance framework that uses C++.
The basic idea is provide a filter that have a while list of HTML tags and a white
list of options for these tags. For example. typical HTML input can consist of
<b>, <i>, tags and <a> tag with href. But straightforward implementation is not
good enough, because, even allowed simple links may include XSS:
Click On Me
There are many other examples can be found there. So I though also about a possibility to create a white list of prefixes for tags like href/src -- so I always need to check if it starts with (https?|ftp)://
Questions:
Are these assumptions are good enough for most of purposes? Meaning that If I do not
give an options for style tags and check src/href using white list of prefixes it solves XSS problems? Are there problems that can't be fixes this way?
Is there a good reference for formal grammar of HTML/XHTML in order to write simple
parser that would cleanup all incorrect of forbidden tags like <script>
You can take a look at the Anti Samy project, trying to accomplish the same thing. It's Java and .NET though.
http://www.owasp.org/index.php/Category:OWASP_AntiSamy_Project#.NET_version
http://www.owasp.org/index.php/Category:OWASP_AntiSamy_Project_.NET
Edit 1, A bit extra :
You can potentially come up with a very strict white listing. It should be structured well and should be pretty tight and not much flexible. When you combine flexibility, so many tags, attributes and different browsers generally you end up with a XSS vulnerability.
I don't know what is your requirements but I'd go with a strict and simple tag support (only b li h1 etc.) and then strict attribute support based on the tag (for example src is only valid under href tag), then you need to do whitelisting in the attribute values as you stated http|https|ftp or style="color|background-color" etc.
Consider this one:
<x style="express/**/ion:(alert(/bah!/))">
Also you need to think about some character whitelisting or some UTF-8 normalization, because different encodings can cause awkward issues. Such as new lines in attributes, non valid UTF-8 sequences.
All details of HTML parsing are specified in HTML 5. However implementation of it is quite a lot of work, and it doesn't matter whether you'll parse HTML exactly with all corner cases. At worst you'll end up with different DOM, but you have to sanitize DOM anyway.
As you mentioned, there are various PHP implementations of this, but I don't know of any in C++, since that's not a language typically applied to web development. Overall, it's going to depend on how complex of an implementation you want to come up with.
A very restrictive whitelist is probably the "simplest" way, but if you want to be really comprehensive I would look into doing a conversion of one of the established versions to C++, as opposed to trying to write your own from scratch. There are so many tricks to worry about, that I think you'd be better off standing on the shoulders of others that have already gone through all that.
I don't know anything about using C++ for web development, but converting PHP to it doesn't seem like it would be a particularly difficult task, PHP doesn't really have any magical capabilities that C++ won't be able to duplicate. I'm sure there will be some small hitches, but overall if you want to go the more-complex route it'd definitely still be faster to do a conversion than a full design from scratch.
HTML Purifier seems like a strong PHP implementation that is still actively maintained, there's a comparison document where the author discuss some differences between his approach and others', probably worth reading.
Whatever you come up with, definitely test it with all the examples you link, and make sure it passes all those. Good luck!