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Document Management
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coi rodo
despite the risk of this being redundant:
recognising that there most likely will never be total agreement on document
formats, there certainly can only be one source format for each project. this
is transformed into target formats as needed, pdf, html, plain text, audio,
braille, just to name a few.
this entails that the source format has to be abstract, meaning it shall
exclusively deal with document structure and shall not in the least express
anything that has to do with how the target format represents the content, as
we want to be able to transform the source into a multitude of targets, with
a broad array of features and specific constraints. this precludes any
wysiwyg, since it has to presume a very specific target representation. TeX
is also not suitable because it does deal with graphical represenation. LaTeX
could be adequate if restricted to document structuring commands, here the
problem is that it readily mixes with TeX and all of its extensions, and so
the user is always tempted to circumvent the abstraction requirement. html is
probably not desireable either since its structuring primtives are rather
weak and it is being overloaded with layout funtionality (cf. LaTeX). a
custom set of xml tags would certainly be very attractive, but this would
also require custom tools to transform into target formats.
ideally the mapping from source to target formats is performed
programmatically using generally available software tools. one problem to be
easily identified here is how to deal with figures, which can hardly be done
without. they usually can not be automatically transformed into a textual
description, as may be neccessary by some targets, the solution would be that
the transformation software prompted the user to provide an adequate textual
representation.
lastly the source format has to be terse and easy to use, as to not overwhelm
the user and prevent serious work.
what comes to mind as far as source formats best adhereing to the
requirements set out is concerned are texinfo and docbook. the former though
as i see it is deficient in image inclusion. as i understand this has to be
done through target specific commands. the later on the other hand is might
be too vast to be easily useable.
wait, what about unicode characters, i guess it would be tricky getting
tengwar properly displayed on an ascii terminal ;)
co'o mi'e .bjorn.
- --
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b.gohla@gmx.de Björn Gohla
pub 1024D/834F4976 2001-01-07 Björn Gohla (Wissenschaftler, Weltbürger)
<b.gohla@gmx.de>
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