Subject: Re: [lojban] Group Document Editing?

From: "Robert J. Chassell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 13 Apr 2001 16:30:09 -0400

TeXinfo isn't terribly manipulable, IMO, but easy enough to output, I
should think.

You are right, it is easy to output. What I am curious about is your
comment that it "isn't terribly manipulable".

You may be coming to the problem from the `wrong end'. Texinfo is
designed to be limited in what it does. This is vital! The reason is
simple: a format such as LaTeX or DocBook gives the author and editor
lots of options. Authors and editors use them....

The problem has to do with the number of wildly different output
formats that modern documents appear in.

Years and years ago, I tried for a long time to substitute LaTeX for
Texinfo. (This was before XML.) In many ways LaTeX is better than
Texinfo.

But LaTeX had, and still has, a problem: an author who uses it tends
to write for a typeset book that will be printed and read by a sighted
person. That makes sense. That is what LaTeX is designed for. And
before the 1970s, that output format, along with specially printed
Braille books or specially read vinyl records, were the main form for
this kind of communication.

Unfortunately, nowadays, people not only drive cars, but some have
computers in them. The rest of us want those drivers to be looking at
the highway, so we want them to listen to a document rather than take
their eyes off the road to read it. In addition, some people are
permanently blind, rather than `situationally blind' as with a car
driver. Others are handicapped in other ways.

Some people do remote administration over a slow link, or check things
over a slow dial up (like me, for example; no alternative as yet).

Given those contraints, Texinfo is good.

(Texinfo also provides for the best on-line navigation mechanism as
yet invented. My sense is that so many people don't know about
incremental search or incremental regexp search that they don't know
what on-line movement efficiency is. If you are not looking for the
English equivalent of {cmila} by typing `laug', you are being
inefficient. But that is another issue and I am not going into here.

(Incidentally, you can put images in a Texinfo document that will be
seen only by a portion of your readership/listenership. Part of the
the art of writing a Texinfo document is that you create it for *all*
your audiences.

(Texinfo has good features and bad features. The bad features mostly
center on how you deal non-English characters and how you deal with
with backwards compatibility for things like colons in node names --
some of these problems have not been solved. These problems are a
penalty for being able to read something from 15 years ago, or listen
to it, or view it on a Web page.)

DocBook formatted files can be written to work as well in the various
output environments as Texinfo -- they can be converted to Texinfo --,
but authors or editors or publishers don't always write that sagely.
They focus on the part of the audience closest to them, who tend to be
sighted, non-drivers. And they exclude the rest. This is not,
strictly speaking, a technical problem. But it is a serious one.

Hence the reason for Texinfo, in spite of all; and the reason, if you
are writing in DocBook format, you should only write that which is
readily converted to Texinfo.

-- 
Robert J. Chassell [email-masked]
Rattlesnake Enterprises http://www.rattlesnake.com