Re: [docbook-apps] Using OpenOffice as a DocBook editor

[Dave Pawson <davep@dpawson.co.uk>]

On Thu, 2005-09-08 at 18:30 +0500, David Tolpin wrote:

> This is because the interface between visual and structural  
> formatting is ill-designed. Insist of asking Johnny to stand on his  
> ears, you should give him an editor that will accept his visual  
> markup and guess what structural element a single-line bold paragraph  
> without a dot at the end correspond to, and ask Johny whether it is a  
> heading indeed, if it is in doubt. That's what a human is doing when  
> reading rich text.
> 
> This way, the human will be doing what suits him most, that is,  
> achieving visual expressiveness, the program will choose (and ask for  
> a confirmation when needed) structural roles for the parts, and will  
> infer style information and apply it to structured parts. It is easy  
> to implement, it even worked to years ago (embodied as a Word  
> plugin).

Thank you David.


>  As usually happens, there are other things that keep me from  
> finishing it.
   Ah well.

Sean McGrath has hacked OoO (or is it oOo) to restrict the available
styles for users. No matter what pretty decorations they add,
all styles are named, which is the key to supporting David's approach.

I don't think technology will ever address this people problem.
We just have to work with it, or employ geeks doing jobs they don't
like!
(Horrible thought :-)

regards DaveP