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