From Keith.Bierman@eng.sun.com Tue Aug 25 20:37:21 1992 Received: from Sun.COM by dkuug.dk via EUnet with SMTP (5.64+/8+bit/IDA-1.2.8) id AA19179; Tue, 25 Aug 92 20:37:21 +0200 Received: from Eng.Sun.COM (zigzag-bb.Corp.Sun.COM) by Sun.COM (4.1/SMI-4.1) id AA00190; Tue, 25 Aug 92 11:37:21 PDT Received: from chiba.Eng.Sun.COM by Eng.Sun.COM (4.1/SMI-4.1) id AA25366; Tue, 25 Aug 92 11:37:23 PDT Received: from localhost by chiba.Eng.Sun.COM (4.1/SMI-4.1) id AA06634; Tue, 25 Aug 92 11:37:13 PDT Message-Id: <9208251837.AA06634@chiba.Eng.Sun.COM> To: WEAVER@stlvm7.vnet.ibm.com Cc: sc22wg5@dkuug.dk Subject: Re: (SC22WG5.178) Word processing In-Reply-To: Your message of "Tue, 25 Aug 92 10:37:30 PDT." <9208251750.AA18349@dkuug.dk> Date: Tue, 25 Aug 92 11:37:13 PDT From: Keith.Bierman@eng.sun.com X-Charset: ASCII X-Char-Esc: 29 SGML is fine for machines; humans have better things to do with their time. I think this is a case where a little facism would have been a good thing; in any group *not*composed*of*computer* experts this would have been solved in 10m and everyone could have lived with it easily. I have used virtually every system from dedicated Xerox wordprocessors to bizarre software for a network of Z-80s; doesn't mean I like to suffer. In my order of preferance: 1) Frame Complete SGML support before our next rev of the standard. Full WYISWG. Support for tables, equations, etc. Available on virtually all major platforms: mac PC/Windows various Unix boxes Sun has used it for *all* documentation for some time; and while far from perfect it can easily handle a million plus pages. Even WG5 is unlikely to be that productive. Note that filters are availble which make importation of WORD, WORDPERFECT, some tame versions of troff and TeX, *relatively* easy. 2) Word Full WYISWG cheap/free thanks to kind offer of M/S. Runs only on Mac+PC's+x86 SCO Unix. Support for tables and equations. 3) WordPerfect Mostly WYISWG Available on large variety of platforms including all the cheap ones (mac, PC, etc.). troff and tex fall above my level of pain. Doing work in a purely markup based system is a giant leap backwards and I can't justify spending my time in such perverse endeavors to my management. Pagemaker (beloved of some fraction of ANSI) isn't a very good wordprocessor. The assumption on the part of the authors is that one has a wordprocessor and *then* one pours the results into pagemaker. We don't have printing/style needs that can't be handled by any commerical grade wordprocessor. Having N packages and SGML as a "tie together" ensures that someone (or many someones) will have to do *a lot* of gratitious work. *Any* wordprocessor of any stature does a nice job of indexes, footnoting, numbering of various sorts and etc. Who will be in charge of creating our SGML macros? Who will be building SGML tools to move the work forward? There is, to the best of my knowledge, no ANSI nor ISO committee off defining the standard wordprocessor of tomorrow. Also, to the best of my knowledge, most commerical organization doing commerical work pick one of the most popular tools and lobby the vendor to put in features .... not write them themselves. SGML/CALS is sucessfull enough that folks like Interleaf and Frame have or are adding support. Just doing Fortran work is hard enough; doing extra work "for grins" strikes me as very counterproductive. As for walt's questions: 1) pure ASCII isn't powerful enough; I see no good reason to mandate that xlation to pure ASCII be perfect. 2) Generation of postscript is a good thing. I regularly trade postscript with PC folks and Mac folks; PC to pure Adobe works trivially (for Word and other packages) from the Mac oftenr equires some modest munging of the postscript header. troff and TeX fail to follow the Adobe structure protocol and are a pain to deal with. 3) Those not involved in direct ownership of the document should be encouraged to use the right tool; but anything including scrawls on napkins can be handled no worse than now. 4) X3J3 should not plan to develop special purpose tools. and yes, I think it is better to use powerful commerical grade tools rather than do extra work.