From bob@rattlesnake.com Mon Sep 20 04:05:18 1999 X-Digest-Num: 238 Message-ID: <44114.238.1313.959273825@eGroups.com> Date: Mon, 20 Sep 1999 07:05:18 -0400 (EDT) From: "Robert J. Chassell" Subject: Re: Fwd: Re: Lojban word processor for Windows? X-Yahoo-Message-Num: 1313 David Brookshire Conner wrote: Sure, but the point that I was trying to make was that typography and orthography was orthogonal to the question of a word processor. Yes, they certainly are, or should be. And typography, well, I'm a structured markup fiend. Mixing typography with word processing seems misguided and encourages lots of visually ugly documents... I am confused here. Suppose you are writing on cyrillic, Tibetan, and latin: do you use structured markup for the different fonts? I don't think so. I suspect you use markup for whether your Tibetan or Korean `Watch Out!' should be emphasized or not. Surely, structured markup is orthogonal to what glyphs used for straight text? ... from taking a book from outline to camera-ready form... Gosh, a voice from out of history. :-) `Camera-ready' is only one kind of output format. For the past couple of decades people I know have read manuals both online and printed: books go from outline to *two* forms, one them `camera-ready', the other `display' ready. The two forms provide different resolutions, different methods of search, different portabilities, and so on. To some extent, each is truly different; but in other ways, the differences are sufficiently regular that a single manuscript can be the source for both kinds of output format. Um, clearly you prefer GNU Emacs - the Lucid/X Emacs branch has supported non-fixed width fonts for years :-) Sorry, just had to take the cheap shot in the editor religious wars :-) Oh, I know that. The problem is and has been for some years strictly legal: the Lucid/X Emacs people are unable to obtain the kinds of disclaimers/assignments that the lawyers I deal with require for wide spread, safe distribution. Without such disclaimers/assignments, it is easy for someone to repeat what has happened in the past, namely to stick some code into a program that gets used by major companies, then threaten the major companies. Some people that tried this in the past got money from several companies (out of court settlements) until faced in court by DEC, at which point they lost. Sure, someone trying this with Lucid/Xemacs would, we hope, lose because the Xemacs people have got legally smarter over the years and they have a track record, but the inclusion decision is still is a question of how much time and money you want to put into legal questions rather than programming questions. Most programmers I know rightfully hate these sorts of legal concern; or else they pay little attention on account they lack experience and street smarts. -- Robert J. Chassell bob@rattlesnake.com Rattlesnake Enterprises http://www.rattlesnake.com