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
|