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Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Sun, 20 Jul 2003 08:13:43 +0200
Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project <[log in to unmask]>
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From: Torsten Bronger <[log in to unmask]>
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In-Reply-To: <l0310281bbb3f7c736932@[130.239.20.144]> ( Lars Hellström's message of "Sun, 20 Jul 2003 01:10:21 +0200")
Organization: Aachen University of Technology (RWTH)
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Halloechen!

Lars Hellström <[log in to unmask]> writes:

> At 23.54 +0200 2003-07-19, Torsten Bronger wrote:
>
>>
>>Lars Hellström <[log in to unmask]> writes:
>>
>> [...]
>>>
>>> How on earth is changing a technical detail (using XML instead of
>>> the admittedly exotic "Word memory dump" format) which most users
>>> are supposed to never encounter going to effect such dramatic
>>> improvements in author practices? (Of course, this bit could be
>>> where the dreaming is applied.)
>>
>>Logical markup.  The author would be *forced* to focus on contents
>>and structure.  There is no list of 150 fonts to choose from
>>anymore, and no way to use an awful baseline skip, or to fake a
>>glyph with fancy field tricks.  They must obey to a big part of the
>>guidelines, no matter whether they want to or not, and whether they
>>are typographically competent or not.
>
> Oh yes, pretty much the old dream of the language that makes errors
> impossible, although in a lighter form. It won't work. If you hide the
> markup, then users won't care about getting it right, and then you haven't
> won anything.

Well, but that's the clever bit: They *must not* get the markup
right.  This is done my programs that transform it to PDF (or
whatever).

> Denying users features that they have grown accustomed to will
> kill much of the popularity,

Therefore I said "one publisher alone would never dare such a
thing".  On the other hand, I don't think that a serious scientist
would change the journal only because he insists on Word.  The input
program I described would be *much* easier to use, and it could
export LaTeX or Word format without problems.  However not the other
direction.

> and be prepared to see users violate markup to get the appearence
> they want: if there is something that users see rendered as
> "bold", there will be users that use it as "bold" regardless of
> what the intended meaning is!

You're right, and this is one of the problems I have with DocBook.
(In DocBook, there really absolutely is no bold at all.)  I would
allow bold, but there still are guidelines and the program could
deploy annoying warning windows whenever you use it.  ;-)

I don't say that the incoming journal article needn't be edited by
the publisher, but it would be much less work than it is now.

Tschoe,
Torsten.

--
Torsten Bronger, aquisgrana, europa vetus

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