Re: Document Authoring Tool Woes

[Anders Rundgren <anders.rundgren@telia.com>]

RE: Document Authoring Tool WoesKen,
I could have gotten it wrong.  Just as a "prestudy" I tried the RTF-generator on Word 97 on one of
my documents.  It went up from 290K to a whopping 12.5M!  Is that's why they call it "Rich" text? :-)
BTW, what does pictures in PowerPoint mean?  OLE-linked PPT objects in documents,
or separately maintained pictures that you do screen-dumps on?

/Anders

----- Original Message ----- 
From: Ken Yagen 
To: S2ML 
Sent: Saturday, January 20, 2001 18:31
Subject: RE: Document Authoring Tool Woes


I thought the decision was to use RTF and/or HTML for editing and Powerpoint/JPEG for Graphics 
Ken Yagen 
Director, Software Development 
CrossLogix, Inc. 
http://www.crosslogix.com 



-----Original Message----- 
From: Anders Rundgren [mailto:anders.rundgren@telia.com] 
Sent: Friday, January 19, 2001 11:32 PM 
To: S2ML 
Subject: Document Authoring Tool Woes 


Hi All, 
In the use-case group the decision is to use XML as authoring language. 
To be honest: I have no idea what that means as XML (unlike HTML) does AFAIK 
not directly support  text formatting.  XML supports anything (or nothing)!  But you must use a 
particular DTD/Schema associated interpreter for each task.  My XMLSpy 3.5 does BTW not 
look like a great word-processor... 
The common objection (inferiority) to use MS-Word that most of us know and have on our 
desktops, is IMO a bit premature until UN, OASIS, IETF or whatever has defined this 
DTD/Schema that gives us truly interoperable word-processing :-) 
Since SUN's Star Office also supports the native Word format I suggest that we standardize 
on some dialect (Word 97 preferably).  Regarding the formatting issues I think the best 
is that the authors "integrate" text and pictures to get a uniform look.  Not a trivial task, 
I know! 
Or someone creates a style-sheet + instructions so that the task becomes more manageable. 
Publishing can be in both DOC and PDF which seems very common. 
Using Word, pictures can be in any format although I personally prefer hi-resolution 
GIF or JPG as they are compatible with any word-processor or type-setting system. 
An alternative to Word is HTML, which is awkward a looks ugly when printed, 
but it feels anyway as a better choice than XML when used as source language. 
As word-processing truly is "religion" [I just confessed mine :-)], this is a thing you probably 
have to vote on to not get stuck in endless discussions.  We may end up with ASCII! 
Anders Rundgren 
CTO X-OBI 
+46 70 - 627 74 37