From maine@altair.dfrf.nasa.gov Fri Aug 28 06:06:07 1992
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Date: Thu, 27 Aug 92 21:06:08 PDT
From: maine@altair.dfrf.nasa.gov (Richard Maine)
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In-Reply-To: Jose Oglesby's message of Thu, 27 Aug 92 19:29:47 EST <9208280241.AA04260@outmail.microsoft.com>
Subject: (SC22WG5.190) RE: Processing Words, Part XLIV
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On Thu, 27 Aug 92 19:29:47 EST, Jose Oglesby <joseogl@microsoft.com> said:

Jose> Markup Language : The problem with this format is that there aren't 
Jose> cheap, consistent, production strength systems available for a wide 
Jose> variety of platforms.  For example, I have seem ads for PC versions of 
Jose> TeX but they were not free and I don't know about their usability.  

Yes, there are commercial versions of TeX for PCs that cost money.
However, there is also several free versions.  Many people seem to
consider emtex (one of the free versions) to be the best PC implementation.
I've got emtex and use it; it seems to work fine and is essentially
indistinguishable from the workstation versions as far as I can tell.

As for "production strength", I've never seen *anything* short of
real typesetting systems that produces output even close to the
quality of TeX for equations.  All of the WYSISAYG editors are
pitiful by comparison.  Admitedly, X3J3's documents don't tend
to have lots of equations.  Some of NASA's do.  The high quality
output plus the ability to use it on every platform of interest
to me are why I use LaTeX for all of my NASA documents.  And
yes, Kieth, NASA Ames and Dryden use it extensively in our reports.

I am generally in favor of the markup language approach.  I'm not
picky about which one.  I use LaTex regularly myself, so I'm
naturally a little partial to it, but I don't think I'd have any
real difficulty adapting to any of the others.  I'd have a lot of
difficulty adapting to most of the fancy WYSISAYG editors.  I do about
half of my work on this kind of stuff at the office on my Sun.  The
other half of the work is done from home via modem.  I don't know
of any of the WYSISAYG editors that will work decently (or at all)
over a modem.

The big advantage of markup languages is that I can use them anywhere
on any platform with any editor or tools I'm comfortable with.  (Why I
could even write code in f90 to manipulate them if I want :-)).  I don't
even need the markup language "processor" unless I want to preview the
document.

If we do adopt a WYSISAYG editor, I consider it critical to evaluate
its export capabilities, as well as its import.  Once data is in
the editor, is there any way to get it back out in a "usable" form
or are you stuck forever in a proprietary product?  A postscript
output doesn't count as "usable" in my book.  Nor, I'm afraid
does running the unix "strings" command on the binary (sorry, Kieth).
People have mentioned that Frame, for instance, can or will be able
to import SGML.  That's fine, but that is only half of the issue.
Can it also export SGML so that other people can make some use
of it without being committed to Frame?  The same question applies
to any other proprietary editor.  I've noticed a tendency for
many of them to have more import than export capability.  (Gee,
why would anyone ever want to take data out of our "great" product
for use in some other "inferior" one)?

--
Richard Maine
maine@altair.dfrf.nasa.gov