1.2 Data flow

PlainDoc system is best understood as a process rather than an application. Understanding of complex documents is easier if you think about which files are the sources, how data flows from them to intermediate files, and finally gets assembled to the document, and possibly converted to target format. Programmers will recognize that pd2tex behaves very much like make(1), checking which source files, like images, changed, and runs the commands necessary to convert them to pdf and then triggers the LaTeX system to produce the final document.

Fig-2: Data flow and image conversions