Next: Running PassiveTeX
Up: passivetex
Previous: PassiveTeX: history and components
- Rapid development;
- well-understood, robust, stable, and freely available page formatter;
- fonts, graphics inclusion, hyperlinks, etc. come for free;
- mature handling of language issues, including hyphenation;
- high-quality math rendering (TeX's raison d'être);
- pdfTeX variant generates very high-quality PDF.
- Constraint to use TeX's page makeup model, and force XSL FO to fit it;
- as LaTeX is already high-level markup, it is too easy to
allow things to fall through and take LaTeX defaults;
- TeX macro writing is obscure and difficult, so that the system
is not transparent for most (non-TeX) programmers;
- TeX is large and monolithic, and difficult to embed in other
applications;
- TeX seems much like a sledgehammer to crack a nut...
Michel Goossens
1999-08-13