Re: Publishing / typesetting print documentation in HTML + CSS (+JS)

[John Allred <jack -at- allrednet -dot- com>]

   At some point, someone here is going to slap my wrist for posting
   things just a little too far off the topic and just a little too long.
   I think Richard covered the question you asked pretty well, Jimmy. So,
   I would hope, there is some slack for stretching out on this particular
   topic. The only thing I would add to Richard's response is that even
   CSS 3.0 is a poor tool for producing text truly intended for a print
   format. For your desktop printer, or for other informal documents, it's
   fine. But for any structured document--book, magazine, newsletter, user
   documentation--where layout of the page is critical, there are precious
   few controls for crafting a well-laid out document. Try kerning text or
   wrapping text around an irregularly-shaped object using HTML/CSS.  Try
   creating dynamic, running headers or footers.
   Conversations here have spasmed over the different ways to try to
   handle the nesting of numbered bullets. It's far easier to take a
   document developed for print and port it to HTML. For PDF output, it's
   as simple as hitting the Print button. Your page layout or--god
   forbid--word processing app has taken care of the formatting to a
   particular paper size already. The idea of going the other way, except
   for churning out queries of raw data and producing a PDF on the fly
   from the web server, baffles me. It's useful to remember that,
   nowadays, the vast majority of content has no real structure and can be
   presented sloppily and informally, and no one will much care. So
   porting a web page to print is probably no longer a concern except to a
   few craftsmen.
   Jimmy, what you're asking about takes me back some 25-30 years. Way
   back, before the World Wide Web and HTML, and before Desktop
   Publishing, even, there was an esoteric language known as SGML, which
   stands for Standard Generalized Markup Language. While SGML is still an
   integral part of the WWW family of languages, its inception was in
   printing. I never used it directly, but I was aware of it soon after my
   entry into DTP with Ventura Publisher's version 2. SGML was developed
   for newspapers, magazines and books. But, it contributed strongly to
   what we now know as XML. eXtensible Markup Language. Kinda has a ring
   to it.
   When Ventura Publisher (VP) was originally developed at Xerox PARC, it
   made use of this language under the hood, but it didn't give the user
   direct access to it. Because of this power of structure, Ventura
   Publisher became the king of PC-based publishing. It had incredible
   power to control every nuance of page layout using definable rules,
   which it, and every other application since has called Tags. Nothing on
   the Mac ever rivaled its power in the first decade or so. VP survived
   several owners, including Corel, until its final release in 2002 as
   Version 10.  Many awful, but popular, packages, like Aldus PageMaker
   and QuarkXpress, required expensive add-on "extensions" in order to
   address the needs of structured text. In spite of having these add-ons
   available, they didn't do structure well.
   VP made attempts through its middle years, as did many other DTP
   packages, to export DTP content to multiple platforms, using a single
   source document. Remember, for my rant later, that this is what we're
   talking about in this thread. The implementations of this, including
   VP's, were poor, partly due to the Wild West state of HTML in those
   days. With Microsoft ignoring nearly everything the W3C proposed as
   standards, pulling a usable set of rules together for everybody was all
   but impossible. The worst implementation, also IMNSHO, was Microsoft
   Word writing a unique CSS class for every jot and squiggle on a page.
   Fine for displaying in other MS apps, if uncontrollable document bloat
   is no issue for you. Useless for any other purpose, though. Microsoft
   has never played nice with anybody else and probably never will.
   I know there are new applications that incorporate some of this ability
   to repurpose content to different platforms. In my mind, though, we
   missed a golden moment more than 20 years ago. That was a time when the
   raw, naked profit motive pushed progress backward rather than forward.
   I'm not sure we'll ever fully recover that opportunity for a
   standards-based world of publishing. With Microsoft finally starting to
   behave itself in IE version 9.x, there's hope, at least, for the Web.
   Consider yourselves lucky. I could give you more snotty opinions about
   all the bad boys in DTP and the Web than you have time to read.
   Microsoft almost succeeded in killing the promise of the web, too, but
   has finally lost that fight to the momentum of intelligence and
   imagination. Not that they wanted, really, to kill the web. They just
   want to own it, lock, stock, and barrel. I take comfort in knowing that
   Microsoft's attempts at document publishing and web publishing, both,
   suffered ignominious deaths.
     * The article at [1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ventura_publisher
       leaves out much important detail, particularly about how SGML
       influenced the development of Ventura Publisher, which inspired the
       DTP industry, despite Aldus PageMaker's claim to that distinction.
     * [2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PARC_%28company%29 Mac people
       believe, and would try to convince you, that Apple invented the
       GUI, DTP, and all the other things we love about computers today.
       In fact, Xerox PARC did the inventing. There was a furious exchange
       of contracts, ideas, cooperation and lawsuits among PARC, Microsoft
       and Apple over all of this. PARC, which also developed Ventura
       Publisher, invented all this stuff. Apple got to the market with it
       first, that's all.
     * [3]http://personal.dvint.com/publications.xml (Published 1998)

   <END OF RANT SUMMARY> Mostly, I've been singing the praises of a now
   defunct piece of software and a few companies that had a vision for the
   world of publishing, no matter the particular implementation--paper,
   web, PDA, multimedia, etc. Because of greed and stupidity, we now face
   the same problems we had 25 years ago, only now we have hundreds of
   different software applications, each trying to tear off a tiny piece
   of a huge, confused market. The chance to unify this field with
   kick-ass software and make your job as a technical writer one,
   primarily, of writing, without regard to technical niceties of
   presentation, are long gone. Thank you Microsoft and Adobe. Sorry I
   didn't buy some stock in your sorry companies years ago. At least I
   could have profited from your short-sightedness.</END Of RANT SUMMARY>
   ~john allred
   On 8/14/2011 6:37 PM, Richard L Hamilton wrote:

Jimmy, little be

Looking again at your message, I would suggest that you look closely at what's a
vailable with the DocBook and DITA schemas. You will find that a lot of the work
 you may be thinking of doing has already been implemented for these two schemas
. Both have active communities that support toolkits that will get you from XML
to html, print, ebooks, and various help formats, and both toolkits allow you to
 customize output in a variety of ways.

You can get from HTML to print, but it's not the easiest way to go in my experie
nce. The only times I've done a book from HTML, I converted the HTML to DocBook
XML and used that toolchain, rather than CSS. There are folks who can do magic w
ith CSS and who would probably disagree with me, but if you're starting with XML
, rather than HTML, I would do what I suggested in my previous message and go di
rectly with whatever toolkit exists for the schema you choose.

Good Luck,

Richard Hamilton
-------
XML Press
XML for Technical Communicators
[4]http://xmlpress.net
[5]hamilton -at- xmlpress -dot- net

On Aug 14, 2011, at 5:05 AM, Jimmy Breck-McKye wrote:


Does anyone here have any experience publishing paper documentation using HTML a
nd CSS?
Because my job involves testing and diagnosing problems in web applications, I'v
e an awful lot of opportunities to learn about these technologies. It makes sens
e to learn one, versatile tool well rather than two poorly. It also makes sense
to use technologies that are well-documented and easily understood by my peers.
CSS helps me tick all these boxes.Practically speaking, I'm told that print CSS
handling is quite mature on certain browsers, and from what I've seen, it looks
as though CSS can do an awful lot. It also looks pretty straightforward to imple
ment an XML - XSLT - HTML + CSS toolchain (as much as XSLT's syntax irritates me
). Working in plain XML would free me to implement parts of my toolchain in othe
r technologies, too (I've had especially good experiences transforming XML with
Python scripts).But that's just the theory. Does anyone have any practical exper
ience on this point? Any advice or common pitfalls?Thanks in advance,Jimmy/p>(Al
so, apologies if the carri
ag

 e

returns are broken. The Techwr-l mail handler seems to have a particular issue w
ith my emails)
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References

   1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ventura_publisher
   2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PARC_%28company%29
   3. http://personal.dvint.com/publications.xml
   4. http://xmlpress.net/
   5. mailto:hamilton -at- xmlpress -dot- net
   6. http://www.doctohelp.com/
   7. mailto:dick -at- rlhamilton -dot- net
   8. mailto:techwr-l-unsubscribe -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
   9. http://lists.techwr-l.com/mailman/options/techwr-l/dick%40rlhamilton.net
  10. mailto:techwr-l-join -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
  11. mailto:admin -at- techwr-l -dot- com
  12. http://www.techwr-l.com/
  13. http://lists.techwr-l.com/mailman/listinfo/techwr-l-chat
  14. http://www.doctohelp.com/
  15. mailto:jack -at- allrednet -dot- com
  16. mailto:techwr-l-unsubscribe -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
  17. http://lists.techwr-l.com/mailman/options/techwr-l/jack%40allrednet.com
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  19. mailto:admin -at- techwr-l -dot- com
  20. http://www.techwr-l.com/
  21. http://lists.techwr-l.com/mailman/listinfo/techwr-l-chat
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