14 Jan
2022
14 Jan
'22
4:53 a.m.
On 14 Jan 2022, at 01:56, Clem Cole
<clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote:
<…>
In real publishing, the division still exists: lots
of
writing in, say, Microsoft Word that is reworked in publishing software
like Quark or InDesign for actual printing.
To give ex-CMU and UCB grad, Ken Keller credit. He tried to bridge that with his
FrameMaker program (which I think Adobe still owns - I have not seen much about it in few
years and have lost track of Keller). IIRC Ken's program could take a Scribe/LaTex
style sheets also. But FrameMaker (like Scribe) was expensive and originally required a
UNIX box with 32-bit linear addressing to compile, so it was fairly late to the PC. I
never really learned it although Ken gave me a copy early on to play with. IIRC our doc
folks at Stellar used it (whereas the Masscomp/ORA folks of the time were strictly roff as
previously discussed).
I used FrameMaker for a while in the early 90’s, (on MIPS Ultrix 4.4, DEC OSF/1
3.2/Digital Unix 4.0/Tru64 5.1, and Solaris 8/9).
It was absolutely targeted at professional document production (vs. word processing), and
had a good separation between templates (with all the styling and layout) and documents
(which added the content). It was also good at merging multiple documents into a book and
applying consistent style across the collection.
I think the versions I used were still produced by Frame Technology(?) — before it was
bought by Adobe anyway.
Ironically, around that same time, Word for Windows 2.0 was IMHO the peak of that
product’s functionality, in that while it allowed the user to randomly apply styling to
the text, it was the last version that made the template facilities an equal first-class
citizen in the UI. It was almost as easy to define and use “semantic” styles for
formatting as it was to just do inline markup. Version 6 (they went from 2 to 6 in one
hop) bent the product firmly towards use by amateurs, with toolbar buttons for bulleted
lists, etc, that hid the underlying use of styles, and thus avoided users incrementally
learning how to do consistent documents. From my perspective, every release since has
made it worse.
More recently, I’ve used DocBook for producing manuals, etc. It’s an awful source
format, but has the usual advantages of being plain text, generating useful textual diffs,
etc. Cobbling together a production process using DocBook, XSLT, and FOP to emit decent
PDF is not for the faint-hearted, and (to circle back to relevance) I always end up
questioning whether it’d just be better to use *roff or (La)TeX with a suitable macro
package instead.
d