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If I understand you correctly, the technology exists (for a price) to enable a writer to write and to label chunks of text with functional tags rather than stylistic tags. This is the <summary> of the chapter. Let the software figure out what that means typographically. And if I want it to mean, say, that the first paragraph of <summary_text> following the <summary_title> gets no indent but subsequent paragraphs of <summary_text> get an em indent, then there is a way to structure a script to make that happen.
If that's the case, I withdraw my curmudgeonly grumble.
As for your general disdain for wysiwyg front ends, I agree with you for technical publishing, although they have their place for graphic arts work. You can burn through a lot of silver and chemicals if you are working blind on a character terminal and have to generated hardcopy output before you can see what the pages look like.
---------- Original Message ----------------------------------
From: "Mark Baker" <mbaker -at- ca -dot- stilo -dot- com>
Reply-To: "Mark Baker" <mbaker -at- ca -dot- stilo -dot- com>
Date: Mon, 23 Jun 2003 14:55:02 -0400
>
> There are a number
>of rendering engines available. The job of a rendering engine is to paginate
>text, kern fonts, apply appropriate leading, and generally do all of the
>page-fitting tasks for which people have been discussing these ugly
>style-based tricks.
>
>Word and Frame can be usefully thought of as rendering engines with WYSIWYG
>editors stuck on the front. (That the editor is a front end for a rendering
>engine is the clear implication of "What you see is what you get")
>
>There are several other rendering engines available, a couple of which are
>TeX and XSL-FO.
>
[snipped for the bot]
>
>So, you choose the rendering engine that has the strengths you are looking
>for.
[snipped for the bot]
>
>So what you need to do is to convert you document into a set of instruction
>written in a rendering engine language.
[snipped for the bot]
>
>To perform this transformation, you need to write a transformation script in
>a transformation language such as XSLT or OmniMark. Which you choose depends
>on a number of factors.
>
>Since writing these formatting scripts can be difficult and time consuming,
>if you want sophisticated layout effects, you should probably design an
>intermediate presentation language in XML. Write your formatting routines
>against that language, and transform all your XML documents into that
>presentation language as a step on the road to formatting. That way, your
>formatting routines are written once and you don't need to touch them again.
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