From: John Joyce <dangerwillrobinsondanger@...>
Date: 2007-04-12T09:45:30+09:00
Subject: Re: [ANN] ClothRed (HTML to Textile)

Valid, but not the same. Human languages leave lots of implicit  
information that isn't easily machine parsed. That comparison is out.
But rich formats don't translate to formats that lack certain  
capabilities.
Particularly PDF to XHTML or Markdown or anything almost.
PDF is a pretty broad format. Layouts don't translate so easily.  
Adobe would love to have such a capability reliably. InDesign could  
then produce layouts for print and the web. Not likely.
On Apr 12, 2007, at 7:00 AM, Gary Wright wrote:

>
> On Apr 11, 2007, at 5:40 PM, Victor "Zverok" Shepelev wrote:
>> May be you're right. Only can I say that for other "rich  
>> formats" (like PDF
>> or OpenOffice) generation conversions textile->pdf can be simpler  
>> than
>> XHTML->pdf (thus, it breaks rule for "the single intermediate format"
>> through chains like Markdown->XHTML->Textile->PDF). What do you  
>> think?
>
> I think that a translator that is designed specifically for X to Y  
> will
> always do better than a translator that goes through an intermediate
> language.  A Russian to Spanish translation is going to be better than
> a Russian to English to Spanish translation.  The benefit of an
> intermediate language is that you don't need n^2 translators only n.
> That doesn't mean that in some special/common cases the direct  
> translation
> might be available and might make a better choice.
>
> Gary Wright
>