Subject: Re: [lojban] JL & LK

From: "Robert J. Chassell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 30 Aug 2002 13:41:41 -0400 (EDT)

... I don't think it would be excessive to expect such people to
view the PDF. Free software is available...

Yes, viewing software is available ... but none that I know of has
risen to the quality of Info in 1984 -- that is to say, none of the
tools with which I am familiar provide easy-to-use, high quality
naviagation using regexps or make it really easy to extract and quote
a part of the document in a email message. If such tools exist
(and I mean tools that you have the freedom to study and redistribute
as well as use; I have no time for tools that restrict me and
others), please tell me.

As far as I can figure out, PDF is designed by and for people who
typeset and print. PDF was designed for a world that is passing; it
is not designed for the modern world.

... The only requirement is a windowing system of some sort.

How well does PDF work with an acoustic desktop? (I am referring to a
good acoustic desktop, not a simple screen reader, to a desktop such
as Emacspeak that enables a blind person to work as efficiently as a
sighted person, with text-to-speech rates up to 500 words per minute
that an experienced user can understand, the ability to listen to
different parts of the same document, cut and paste among such parts,
as well as with other documents, send and receive email, listen to a
calender, handle networking, and such.)

The PDF tools with which I am familiar are `viewers' not listeners. I
don't know of any that work in a decent acoustic windowing system.

Please settle on a format that is general, that works for typesetting
and printing and for creating Web pages and for creating efficent
on-line documents, and works both for sighted people and for the blind
(and I count auto drivers as `situationally blind', since I want them
looking at the road, not at a computer screen with Lojban material on
it).

Please note that the markup language you choose makes a difference,
because the markup language enables different kinds of action. Some
years ago, I tried to convert the `Red Book' sources to Texinfo, but I
found that the markup language used led to habits of typesetting that
made it too difficult for me to make the conversion in the time that I
had. A single Texinfo document can be converted to many different
output formats; consequently an author must restrain what he or she
does. The constraints are different when you aim for only one output
format.

Texinfo imposes restraints that enable you to typeset and print a
regular book (using PDF if you wish), navigate efficiently line in
Info, or create Web pages. 

(An example of an online issue: from the point of view of someone
from the early 1980s, HTML is instrinsically broken. Because of its
design, you can never create an HTML document that you can navigate as
efficiently as an Info document. This is because HTML does not
distinguish between references to another part of the same document
and references to node outside the document. So your search mechanism
can work well only within the current page; or you must depend on a
preconstructed index.)

Nonethless, in spite of its contrainsts you can write complex works in
Texinfo, such the book describing Emacs Calc. That book talks about
algebraic simplificiation, matrixes, and more. The source can easily
be converted to PostScript or PDF and printed, or put up on a Web
site, or converted to Info.

XML is not as good as Texinfo; the sources are harder to read or
listen to than Texinfo sources, but it is a popular mark up language
and would be an OK choice, too.

Either could be extended to handle Lojban, both for the sighted and
the blind.

-- 
Robert J. Chassell [email-masked] [email-masked]
Rattlesnake Enterprises http://www.rattlesnake.com
Free Software Foundation http://www.gnu.org GnuPG Key ID: 004B4AC8