Document Crafting, Objectively

Alan Kay Alan.Kay at squeakland.org
Wed Mar 6 14:54:53 UTC 2002


Ian Piumarta in the past has done various versions of TEX and (I 
think) LaTEX in some version of Smalltalk (maybe VisualWorks).

I think the TEX constraint solver is great, but it really needs a UI 
to allow WYSIWYG editing rather than the 1960s (bad) style of markup 
editing. (Remember WYSIWYG doesn't mean closed format. That's just 
the way MS decided to do it.)

It would be terrific to have such a solver with an integrated editor 
as an central part of Squeak's layout powers.

Let's drag some of these good ideas kicking and screaming into the 
21st century (or at least the 70s).

Cheers,

Alan

------

At 7:47 AM -0500 3/6/02, 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?
>
>
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