From nellardo@xxxxxxxxxx.xxxx Mon Sep 20 12:18:52 1999 X-Digest-Num: 239 Message-ID: <44114.239.1317.959273825@eGroups.com> Date: Mon, 20 Sep 1999 15:18:52 -0400 (EDT) From: David Brookshire Conner From: "Robert J. Chassell" > > David Brookshire Conner wrote: [....] > 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. You don't use the structured markup to denote what *font* you are using but you might very well use it to denote what *language* you are using. Whether or not you do this depends on exactly what kind of doucment you are writing. Suppose you are writing a novel that includes fluently multilingual characters. The *structure* may have more to do with who says what than it does with what language someone is speaking. Now suppose you are writing a textbook for learning a foreign language. Here, clearly, marking the language can be quite important, whether or not the languages in the book use the same glyphs or not. For example, writing a textbook on Russian, sections will describe Cyrillic, including the characters, but the language will be English (well, it will if *I* write it :-) > Surely, structured markup is orthogonal to what glyphs used for > straight text? Yes of course - I wasn't suggesting that. Glyphs are not fonts. Unicode does not describe a font. Unicode describes characters which have stereotypical appearances (the glyph). You need a font to render something - that's typography, not word-processing. Hmmm. I suppose I'm getting definitional here, so here's how I'm using things: character - value in some sort of script glyph - the archetypical appearance of a character; alt. the particular appearance of a character represented by a particular font. Word processing - rearranging characters (usually in groups, i.e., words :-) (Structured) markup - notating the logical structure of a string of characters. Formatting - Mapping markup to particular renderings. Typography - The subset of formatting concerned with fonts and placement of glyphs (in sense 2 above). Font - a set of graphical symbols with a mapping from symbol to character. The map need not be complete, but is usually a function (i.e., one graphical symbol is associated with one character. One character may have many representations in the font). > ... 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. Of course. > 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. Right - of course. This wasn't a manual. This was a textbook. Six years ago (when I wrote it), Addison Wesley wasn't about to consider distributing a textbook on CD ROM. Three years ago (when I was working on the revision), they were, and had that project continued, I would have produced both camera ready and display ready copy, most likely from one SGML source. > 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. Ah, of course. Lawyers, gotta love em. [...] > 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. I hope I'm the former, not the latter :-) Brook --------- A computer's attention span is as long as it's power cord. --------- Fancy. Myth. Magic. http://www.concentric.net/~nellardo/