From bob@RATTLESNAKE.COM Fri Apr 13 13:30:22 2001 Return-Path: X-Sender: bob@rattlesnake.com X-Apparently-To: lojban@yahoogroups.com Received: (EGP: mail-7_1_2); 13 Apr 2001 20:30:22 -0000 Received: (qmail 25647 invoked from network); 13 Apr 2001 20:30:22 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.26) by l10.egroups.com with QMQP; 13 Apr 2001 20:30:22 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO benthic.rattlesnake.com) (140.186.114.245) by mta1 with SMTP; 13 Apr 2001 20:30:20 -0000 Received: (from bob@localhost) by benthic.rattlesnake.com (8.9.3/8.9.3/Debian 8.9.3-21) id QAA11247; Fri, 13 Apr 2001 16:30:09 -0400 Date: Fri, 13 Apr 2001 16:30:09 -0400 Message-Id: <200104132030.QAA11247@benthic.rattlesnake.com> To: jay.kominek@colorado.edu Cc: lojban@yahoogroups.com In-reply-to: (message from Jay Kominek on Fri, 13 Apr 2001 12:50:53 -0600 (MDT)) Subject: Re: [lojban] Group Document Editing? Reply-to: bob@rattlesnake.com References: From: "Robert J. Chassell" 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 bob@rattlesnake.com Rattlesnake Enterprises http://www.rattlesnake.com