RE: RE: Why WYSIWYG for XML???

[Mailing List <mlist -at- ca -dot- safenet-inc -dot- com>]

Gene Kim-Eng offered:
 
> As someone who continues to be somewhat nostalgic for
> the days when we used to spend our time working with
> product to generate content and send raw text to 
> production people for formatting and page design,
> I would see a truly effective "roboformatter" as 
> a benefit that would free me to spend more time 
> finding, organizing and writing information.  Beats
> me how anyone could see spending their time on that
> as "confining yourself to single-function cog-ness."
> 
> At the risk of reigniting yet another "font fondler"
> exchange, this sounds more to me like the attitude 
> I'd expect from someone who thinks their primary 
> value as a writer is taking input from other people 
> and making it "look good."

Oh, ok. But to me, on the other hand, it sounded more 
like the "production people" you describe in your first 
paragraph.

For those of us in one-writer shops or with just a few 
writers on the team, we don't have "production people"
we've been using (gasp!) WYSIAWYG software like FrameMaker 
for years. So we control both the input (by going and 
getting it) *and* the look of the output.  As Geoff 
pointed out, there's always something that needs tweaking. 
It may be just my failing that I've never designed the 
perfect template that could suit me for the rest of my 
days, but I've never gone more than two releases of a 
doc set without running up against something that's broken, 
or that no longer serves the updated needs.

Now that I do Help, as well, that's only multiplied.

It wasn't working to go from FM-based books, but once 
we get our Help pages into the desired XML format, 
we'll be effectively single-sourcing Help and QuickStart 
Guides and one or two other output formats (Technotes, 
Update Sheets, etc.).

I'll see about using Bluefish if there's no objection, 
'cuz I've briefly tried it, and it seems to work the 
way Bruce describes. But I'll also have to remain in 
charge of the various outputs, as soon as I learn how 
to do that.  Chicken, meet the Egg. Egg, this is the 
Chicken. One of you came before the other, I think...

Now, if you'll excuse me, I find that the old table 
format is no longer sufficient, and I may need to turn 
them on their sides to add new columns.  YOW! That's ugly! 
I may have to fondle a font or two to get this fixed...

/kevin
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