Re: Word Processors: Outlines, Main Text and Footnotes

< Next Message | Back to archived message list | Previous Message >

Note: This message is from the outliners.com archive kindly provided by Dave Winer.

Outliners.com Message ID: 5190

Posted by cacx1999
2006-02-07 20:11:58

Graham,

thanks, nice read, but it misses some crucial points.
First, I can find no reference to “XML” or “DTD” in that document (which I found out, BTW, to be a republication of a 2004 Newsforge article - what problem do all those people on the web have with dates? Sometimes you even find the day and month of an article or post, but not the year! But most often, you’ll find an automatically generated date of today which has nothing to do with the date the article was written).
Even worse, we use not XML (which is fairly common these days) but SGML (and a pretty old version of “FrameMaker+SGML”, before Adobe incorporated structured documents into a single “FrameMaker” product). This is one of those business decisions that originate at some point in history and are very tough to change. We’re talking about the whole database of a leading publishing house here. And I’m glad I’m not in charge of all that :-)
The article is a quite short-sighted comparison from a desktop-publishing point of view. FrameMaker *is* a rather lame and outdated desktop publishing application. But it is very reliable (although we did encounter some annoying quirks over the years, but *much* less than in Word - and we do 95% work in FrameMaker, 5% in Word). And it is very integrated into a semi-automated workflow here that should not be tampered with.
And in some contexts it doesn’t really matter if a licence costs 2000$ or nothing. I wish some MBA types would understand that correctly.

But all that wasn’t the subject of the OP and the intention of this thread. That should be more about outlining and creative/academic writing ;-)

Back to archived message list