Re: robust software

[Herb Schulz <herbs@WIDEOPENWEST.COM>]

On 3/11/03 10:24 AM, "John S. Denker" <jsd@MONMOUTH.COM> wrote:

> ... Rather than converting them to Word format, I
> recommend converting them to an industry-standard
> open format such as html.  There are many good
> reasons for this. ...

Howdy,

I fully agree that an open standard is the way to go.  However I couldn't
agree less with using html since it i)isn't very rich in formatting and
ii)the rendering of the formatting depends on which browser you use.

A better choice in the long run will be XML which is very rich in formatting
capability.  Unfortunately there aren't many XML editors out there.

For technical documents one might try TeX/LaTeX/Context since the files are
simple text files. It is possible to include many graphics formats in LaTeX
files and using pdflatex you can get beautiful .pdf files with embedded
scalable fonts, mathematics, etc. The .pdf files I've seen that have ugly
fonts on screen seem to have Type 3 (bitmapped) fonts embedded in the
document rather than Type 1 (Postscript). Unfortunately, TeX/LaTeX/Context
have fairly steep learning curves IF you want change formatting, etc.

This leads me to .pdf format. It would be nice to have an editor that
produces .pdf directly, as its native format. Here is an open document
standard that is beautiful both on screen and printed. It would be nice to
have lots of software that could edit a pdf file, etc., besides Acrobat.

Any others?

Good Luck,

Herb Schulz
(herbs@wideopenwest.com)