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Subject:Re: Rant: Giving up on XML From:"Edgar D' Souza" <edgar -dot- b -dot- dsouza -at- gmail -dot- com> To:"eric -dot- dunn -at- ca -dot- transport -dot- bombardier -dot- com" <eric -dot- dunn -at- ca -dot- transport -dot- bombardier -dot- com> Date:Sat, 17 Mar 2007 15:15:35 +0530
On 3/16/07, eric -dot- dunn -at- ca -dot- transport -dot- bombardier -dot- com > > As you pointed
out in your impassioned comment on our lack of
> > understanding - the front end doesn't matter
> Did I say that? I certainly don't think I did. Front end is an important
> part of the tool chain.
Well, I kind of got the impression that the content - and structure -
was what DocBook was all about, not WYSIWYG tools and like. As such,
what I was (mistakenly, it appears) looking for was a way to specify
such callout layering information in DocBook, regardless of the
front-end used - even if using NotePad. But it's beginning to
penetrate my coco-nut that the upshot of all these posts is - you
can't do that! Fred Ridder sent me an off-list mail that gently
pointed out that that I was asking for oranges in a bushel of apples
:-) or rather, what I wanted was in the domain of what WYSIWYG tools
could do, and not DocBook per se.
> Totally linked to tool chain. You seem to want to have an graphics editor
> integrated with your authoring tool. If you wanted to have overlays like
> Word or FM,where the underlying image is used as-is elsewhere, then that
> would be more complicated. But it's all down to the authoring and graphics
> tool, and rendering tool (can the rendering tool overlay the callout
> information over the other image.
Sorry to bug you again (! oh, no! :-) ) but - if I read this
correctly, you say that I _can_ encode that kind of information in a
DocBook file, provided I use a specialized rendering tool to render
the output (and, of course, a special editor which does this kind of
extra information embedding into the DocBook source). Is that right,
or am I too far off the mark?
> > > How are your illustrations produced?
> > PrintScreen >> GIMP >> Save as PNG
>
> So, if nothing else is possible add your callouts using GIMP.
Sigh.. yes, I'd thought of that a long time ago, but it adds the
overhead of maintaining XCF files in case we ever want to edit the
"callouts" in the future. I know, I know, can't have my cake and eat
it too... but I was *so* hoping that DocBook would allow me a way...
Still, thanks for all the information you've shared, as well as the
initial piquancy! :-)
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