[Vim-latex-devel] Re: LaTeX help for Vim

[Luc H. <her...@fr...>]

* On Sun, Nov 10, 2002 at 04:05:04PM +0100, Peter Karp <pe...@ka...> wrote:
> > Not every body using VIM have these tools installed, nor VIM
> > compiled to accept such script.
> ??? You mean somebody will not be able to run a simple Vim script foo.vim?
> I doubt that. Or did you mean that not everybody has Perl or awk configured
> in some way to work with Vim? That's surely right.

I mean your second hypothesis: having vim installed does not mean one
has perl nor awk installed. Nor one has a vim version with support of
perl.

> > With XT, i didn't have to run any makefile to install it.
> ? What's XT? 

XT is a parser that render XML data into any format (html, php, TeX, ...
and even pure text file if we want to) according to a given XSLT file. 

> > > I'm (at least now) on a Win32 platform and as I understood Michael
> > > the XML/XSLT tools are not all available for the win platform. 
> > XT is available on windows (I'm currently under a WinMe + cygwin box),
> > and here exist other tools, check the xsl faq on:
> >     http://www.dpawson.co.uk/xsl/xslfaq.html
> Thanks for the pointer. On a first look I didn't found how that would help
> me -- not with a too big effort.

I don't remember where exactly, but in the FAQ, there is a list of
products able to parse XSLT+XML documents to render the data in other
formats. XT is referenced, amongs several other free and not free
programs.

> My thought was that a Vim script might be the best solution, because every
> Vim user who would like to take the XML sources to add personal stuff will
> surely have Vim. 
> All other solutions seem not so easy to use for me. 

I understand what you mean.
But, converting an XML file thanks to a dedicated tool (ie an XML+XSLT
parser) will be easier than trying a parse a tagged file will tools like
awk. Awk is nice, but not the easiest tool for this task.

> Every other solution like Perl and even more XSLT would need more
> effort and is not likely to be installed "just" to translate the docs
> for themself. 
> O.K. one can argue that not many people would like to add personal
> stuff. That could be true. 

I think so: not every body will want to add stuff to the doc. And if
they want to do it, they will likely share with other people, and they
may be interrested in using appropriate tools.

> _I_ want to be able to add personal content :-)

You have awk installed. Not everybody has it -- unless having access to
a *NIX system.

Anyway. It is not very important as you can provide an awk script to
translate the docs into HTML/vim-help ; and other people can provide two
XSLT files aimed at producing the same thing.

Regards,

-- 
Luc Hermitte