[racket] Integrating scribble and LaTeX

Quoth Prabhakar Ragde:
> Faced with the same decision a few weeks ago, I first decided, after 
> learning what I could do with Scribble, to write everything in Scribble 
> and render through LaTeX. ...  I'd much rather write Scribble than
> LaTeX. --PR

Quoth Robby Findler:
> So I think your best bet is to just pick a small piece and try to redo
> that part in scribble and see how that works out.

ARGH.  I *knew* this was the response I would get, but I thought I'd
give y'all the benefit of the doubt.

The reasons I want to use Scribble snippets inside a broader LaTeX
context is that I have a substantial part of this document already
written, and a huge installed base of LaTeX documents that include a
large amount of custom definitions.  I do have time during this project
to learn a bit of Scribble; I do not have time during this project to
learn all of Scribble and convert all my .cls files into their nearest
Scribble equivalents.

It seems likely that at some point I might have wanted to shift over to
writing Scribble from scratch.  I may yet do that.  But it's going to be
a lot harder to make that decision if I can't first dip in my toe and
make it work with my existing installed base.  It's especially hard if
I'm not yet sure Scribble can do everything I want it to and thus might
be required to abandon the effort half-done.  And it's not such a
strange request (like "why can't Scribble work with MS Word" would be),
since LaTeX is *precisely what Scribble generates*.

I certainly don't expect that a feature be implemented just because I
want it, and even good features may take a while due to being low
priority or whatever.  And there may well be some technical impediment
to just creating a scribble.sty and working from there that I (a
newcomer to the scene) can't see yet.  But even if you're attempting
evangelism (and perhaps especially then), the correct answer to "How do
I X" should in general not be "You shouldn't even want to X, you should
Y instead".  This response feels a lot like the rightly-derided
responses of "install linux!" whenever anyone asked "how to I get
Windows to..." on certain message boards a few years back: unhelpful and
annoying.

So verbatim it is, I guess.

-- 
-=-Don Blaheta-=-dblaheta at monm.edu-=-=-<http://www.monmsci.net/~dblaheta/>-=-
"Humorous and detailed stories that people aren't bound to take
seriously make for *excellent* smalltalk.  If you can hide the fact that
you're just retelling an old X-Files episode, even better."
						--Jonathan Prykop