A Structural Comparison of LATEX and FrameMaker

LATEX [1,2] and FrameMaker TM (e.g. [3]) both employ text markup, i.e. they use annotations rather than actual format to indicate the layout of text. Markup languages belong to a family that includes HTML (HyperText Markup Language [4]), derivatives of roff (Run-Off Language) and SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language [5]). Although LATEX and FrameMaker superficially share the same approach, their philosophies and details are very different. The aim of this paper is to examine the two from a structural point of view. The goal was essentially practical, namely to derive techniques and tools for supporting both LATEX and FrameMaker in a mixed environment. LATEX is to some extent oriented towards the sciences, although it is a general-purpose language. LATEX is widely used for scientific articles, papers, books and theses. LATEX derives many of its benefits from the underlying TEX system [6], for example its excellence in typesetting mathematics. Since LATEX is ‘merely’ a macro package written in TEX and since TEX is effectively a programming language, it is possible to extend LATEX for almost any typesetting task. For this reason, it is difficult to define the exact capabilities of LATEX. This article concentrates on LATEX as it might be obtained in a standard distribution. Programmability makes LATEX very flexible, but unfortunately it can be tricky to enhance or modify existing LATEX behaviour. Some stylistic changes are easy (e.g. alphabetic section identification), others require a detailed knowledge of how LATEX is implemented (e.g. altering the layout of a section heading). Changing LATEX is probably beyond the interest of ordinary users, who can rely on styles defined by others. The original LATEX was developed largely by Leslie Lamport. Subsequently Michel Goossens, Frank Mittelbach, Alexander Samarin, Rainer Schöpf and others cooperated on its refinement. The current version is LATEX2ε, on its way to becoming LATEX3. Major reasons for the popularity of LATEX include its widespread distribution, its portability and the fact that it is free. FrameMaker has been slanted more towards commercial publishing. It is entirely visual with WYSIWYG support, which makes it more approachable for those who are uninterested in program-like markup. Despite this, FrameMaker is surprisingly flexible. Attributes are