Re: Word Processors

[Olof Oberg <mill pedgr571 sn umu se>]

John R Sheets <dusk@smsi-roman.com> wrote:
> Olof Oberg wrote:
[snip]
> > With good I mean something easier than the Elisp
> > tutorials *looking at a non-working CSS mode*.
> 
> What do you mean?  Were the tutorials released prematurely, referencing
> an unfinished feature?
I couldn't find a tutorial on how you make a mode so I tried to 
change an existing one, but i failed miserably. If end users 
are gonna make their own macros and templates we need to have 
good tutorials with examples (I want examples now, references 
later when I know what I am doing).

> I'm gonna have to start weeding through all these, learning them
> better....XML, XSL, DSSSL, Guile, ad nausem....  The extra knowledge
> definitely won't go to waste.  (c:
I sent a summation of these things to Todd Lewis yesterday. 
Maybe it can be useful.

> Yes, this is an important abstraction.  The less technical jargon (e.g.
> point sizes, font names, etc.) the user has to worry about, the easier
> the UI will be to use.
Well currently users WANT to worry about these things. I think 
part of our work will be to educate them to it a better way. 
'Force' them to do it right way and in the end they will see 
the benefits of it.

For example I learned this the hard way in high school. We had 
paper in our religion class. As usual we didn't do much until 
the last week before we had to hand it in so we thought we would 
up for the lack of quality by having a color printed cover (this 
was in 1992-93). We sat constantly for three days typing in our 
text on my Macintosh LC (PageMaker) and made headers a certain 
size and font face (at least we were consistent). We finished this 
early in the morning and then I took the bus to the press at the 
university (only one that accepted such a small job I think). 
Now, I had to sit for five hours changing all ths text to something 
their system understood (mainly TrueType -> Type 1).

I wished PageMaker had told me how I should've done this and saved 
me a lot of time. Oh, and we didn't get an A because our teacher 
actually read the papers.

> >'Creativity' that means waste of
> > money crippling of assumed benefits of computers in a corporate
> > environment (hard to index and search such documents for example).
> 
> I'm not sure what you mean here.
Employees spend time making 'pretty' documents instead of doing 
it properly with templates and style sheets. This lessen the 
benefits of having computers by making ir hard to impossible to 
store documents for future use. Meaning creating indexes for a 
set of documents or searching the same set. 

 /mill

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