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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Re: Are the publishing users happy? Why not?
 ndw@n... (Norman Walsh) writes: >And yet I've watched [writers] spend hours tinkering with formatting in >their WYSIWYG tools, despite the fact they've been told that all the >formatting is going to get discarded. A well-designed set of labeled styles can help a lot here, actually. I find that many of these writers really want their prose to _look_ like it will on the final printed page, and that desire can be used to lure them down the path of labeled structures. Character-level habits are much harder to break than paragraph-level habits, but there's occasional cause for hope. One prospect that I've really hoped to see emerge - and may yet get to see - is editable but very different views of the same document. I had a publisher that at one point insisted that I use a new template for my book, saying that it had been optimized for the production editors. It was pretty horrible, seeming to emphasize places where the most things went wrong, and really killed my interest in writing for a while. Fortunately, enough writers complained that they went back to the old template within about a month. Now that I'm on the other side of that fence, editing most of the time, I can see what the production folks wanted. We have all kinds of cool tools for getting from (Word | XML) -> Frame -> (Word | XML), but they all (apart from raw DocBook) present the information in a form as close to final presentation as possible. Most of the programming I'm doing right now (not the editing/authoring part) is devoted to making these kinds of multi-view approaches easy, or at least easier. Presentation makes a huge difference in how I approach information. While I hate to admit this in a reply to Norm Walsh, I'm hoping the XML features in Word 11 that MSFT was showing off at XML 2003 will be a part of that, since I also have a huge chasm between DocBook and Word that needs bridging. I've had a section called "The WYSIWYG Disaster" at the start of all three editions of XML: A Primer. If there were to be a fourth edition - can't been given that I work for a competitor of my publisher - that tale might have a somewhat happier ending. The jury's still out, but I'm a little more hopeful. >Structured authoring is hard. Yes. -- Simon St.Laurent Ring around the content, a pocket full of brackets Errors, errors, all fall down! http://simonstl.com -- http://monasticxml.org 
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