Re: [COFF] Scribe (Typesetting System) and Unix

Scribe was in the mix after troff and TeX. Brian Reid’s observation was that writers should be writing, and publishing professionals should design how documents look. Writers can describe that they want emphasized words, chapters, sections, quotations, and the appearance of those is designed by people who know about how to do that. The software was commercially available on UNIX and other systems for some time from a company called Unilogic, later Scribe Systems, but it didn’t survive in the marketplace. Wordstar and Microsoft Word came along on the desktop, and academics didn’t like paying for it. Reid’s idea of how the work should be distributed was swept aside by publishing tools that writers could use to do passable documents but not beautiful ones. 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. But one could argue that Scribe sort of exists in a way, in LaTeX. My understanding is that Leslie Lamport started LaTex as exactly a way to bring Scribe’s ideas to producing TeX documents, and the basic LaTeX structure looks a lot like Scribe. Because you can dive into TeX to tweak all the tiny details, and because LaTeX packages work at all different levels of abstraction, it’s sometimes hard to see the separation there, especially when you’re fighting with LaTeX to submit a paper. But it’s the Scribe idea at the core. - Win