TechWhirl (TECHWR-L) is a resource for technical writing and technical communications professionals of all experience levels and in all industries to share their experiences and acquire information.
For two decades, technical communicators have turned to TechWhirl to ask and answer questions about the always-changing world of technical communications, such as tools, skills, career paths, methodologies, and emerging industries. The TechWhirl Archives and magazine, created for, by and about technical writers, offer a wealth of knowledge to everyone with an interest in any aspect of technical communications.
Subject:RE: RE: Interviewing "under the hood"? (long) From:"Mark Baker" <mbaker -at- ca -dot- stilo -dot- com> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Mon, 23 Jun 2003 15:36:44 -0400
> 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.
Yes. Actually, the technology exists for free. You can get FOP free from
Apache and XSLT free from lots of people (including Apache). There is enough
here to do an adequate job for a number of purposes. For more sophisticated
applications, either in terms of automating the synthesis of your XML
chunks, or in creating more complex and subtle formatting, commercial
software (such as ours) provides additional functionality and/or ease of
use.
>
> 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.
Agreed. There is formatting by rule and there is formatting by eye. If you
are formatting by eye, then you are necessarilly working by hand, but if you
are formatting by rule, then a machine should be doing the donkey work.
RoboHelp Studio maximizes your Help authoring power by combining
RoboHelp Office and RoboDemo, so you can easily create professional
Help systems that feature interactive tutorials and demos.
---
You are currently subscribed to techwr-l as:
archive -at- raycomm -dot- com
To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-techwr-l-obscured -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com
Send administrative questions to ejray -at- raycomm -dot- com -dot- Visit http://www.raycomm.com/techwhirl/ for more resources and info.
