Hi all:

Over the past couple of days, I\'ve been doing some thinking...normally, I do 
most of my documentation work in LaTeX, and it does the job quite well.  It has 
it\'s obvious quirks, but I prefer it to, say, HTML or some closed-format word 
processor.

Lately I\'ve had several thoughts swimming around my head...I\'ve been playing 
with BookMorphs and experimenting with \"active essays\" in Squeak.  It\'s gotten 
me thinking: could there be a better way to craft text?  The BookMorph/HyperCard 
idea is fascinating and powerful...but I\'ve still got Literary Machines swimming 
in my brain, along with V. Bush\'s Memex.  The idea of a continuum of text that 
can be assembled objectively keeps coming back to haunt me. :)

The way I see it, creating \"active essays\" and things like Nelson\'s 
hyper-documents are great!  But we also need some way to translate that into a 
more traditional medium as well.  For me, LaTeX is an interesting 
medium...almost a textual \"Model\".  I write my documentation, I mark it up, and 
I create a \"View\" that I want from it--usually HTML (latex2html) or PDF 
(pdflatex).  Or, I can view it \"native\" (DVI).

The SWiki illustrates a wonderful concept as well...when I create a page, it 
creates an object that I can reference and link to from anywhere, by just using 
the name of that page.  It\'s almost like working in that continuum of text I was 
talking about earlier.

So my question...are there any thoughts on this subject?  Has anyone else 
pondered the usage of Squeak for document and book writing?


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