14 Jan
2022
14 Jan
'22
midnight
On Jan 13, 2022, at 8:06 AM, Clem Cole
<clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote:
On Thu, Jan 13, 2022 at 10:08 AM John P. Linderman <jpl.jpl(a)gmail.com
<mailto:jpl.jpl@gmail.com>> wrote:
Many of us who wrote articles for the Bell System Technical Journal would disagree. The
BSTJ publishers could transform something that made sense when viewed as troff output
into unintelligible gibberish. You cannot split a UNIX command line into multiple lines
just because it "looks better". Sometimes format really matters.
I think that is true for any scheme -- professionals and editors need to work together.
That's what Jon was suggesting. When they don't have shared vocabulary/goals -
bad things can happen. FWIW: I can not speak for him directly as I never had this
conversation with him (Win might have), but from what I knew/know of Brian Ried I think he
might agree with what I'm suggesting. IMO, there will always be cases like the one
that you described. This is not particular to any document compiler system. The
question is how to bring the two sides together and who has the high order bit?
In one of his blogposts Douglas Crockford has suggested that Scribe would have made a
better declarative markup language than SGML!
If you read Bibtex's manual they talk about <some feature> being put in for
SCRIBE compatibility. Even the bibliographic reference form looks SCRIBE-like. For
example,
@Article{Arrabito:EPODD-1-2-117,
author = "R. Arrabito and H. J{\"{u}}rgensen",
title = "Computerized {Braille} Typesetting: Another View of Mark-up
Standards",
journal = j-EPODD,
year = "1988",
volume = "1",
number = "2",
pages = "117--132",
month = sep,
}
But in a sense the Scribe markup is at a different level than troff or TeX. LaTeX is more
declarative, which is one of the reasons for people preferring it to pure TeX.
My complaint with Word and the like, is that the
'control' is hidden. It's $%^& magic -- why is it indenting here? Hey
I did not tell it to make it go italics ...
Word is lower level than TeX/troff.