Document Crafting, Objectively

Kevin Fisher kgf at golden.net
Wed Mar 6 13:05:46 UTC 2002


ACH!  Dratted webmail client...my apologies, my webmail client seems to
have inserted all kinds of backslash-escapes all over the place. :(


On Wed, Mar 06, 2002 at 07:47:00AM -0500, kgf at golden.net wrote:
> 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?
> 
> 
> -----------------------------------------------------
> This mail sent via Golden Triangle Web-Mail
> http://www.golden.net
> 
> 



More information about the Squeak-dev mailing list