Document Crafting, Objectively

Hannes Hirzel hirzel at spw.unizh.ch
Thu Mar 7 18:09:27 UTC 2002


Hello all,


IMHO we'have actually two topics in this thread

1) Front end for TeX for typesetting

2) Writing Active Essays

I'd like to comment on both





----------------
1) TeX front end
----------------


On Thu, 7 Mar 2002, Kevin Fisher wrote:

> On Wed, Mar 06, 2002 at 06:54:53AM -0800, Alan Kay wrote:
> > 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.)
> 
> :) Yes, TeX/LaTeX markup can be quite confounding.  For the longest time
> I couldn't figure out how to make a simple '\' character (every other
> odd character seems to have it's own escape character, but not '\'!)
> 
> I'm certainly not against WYSIWYG at all...but I really like the
> option of a self-structuring kind of document, similar to what
> LaTeX provides.  I spent a couple years working with LyX before I learned
> LaTeX and although it was odd at first, having the structure magically
> taken care of made a lot of sense after a while.
> 
> 
> > 
> > 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).
> 
> 
> That would be fabulous, exactly the sort of "itch" that needs scratching.
> Without the archaic markup, of course... :)

A TeX front end in Squeak would be great. A first modest step could just
be having a Workspace read and write LaTeX files while rendering italics,
bold and chapter and sections headings correctly. And to have an aid to
layout tables. I definitly do not consider markup to be archaic for
storing texts. Good markup helps processing texts considerably. The
current text processing systems take away a lot of time because of
their bugs, their baroque user interface. It needs a lot of tinkering.
For many texts it's easier to learn 10 markup commands and let the 
be done by a good layout algorithm.





----------------
2) Active Essays
----------------


> > 
> > At 7:47 AM -0500 3/6/02, kgf at golden.net wrote:
> > >Hi all:
[snip]
> > >Lately I\'ve had several thoughts swimming around my head...I\'ve been playing
> > >with BookMorphs and experimenting with \"active essays\" in Squeak. 

I wonder why not more people are writing active essays. All the tools
seem to be there in Squeak. Why we not use this possibility? 
Because we are used nowadays to the HTML paradigm? 
Well I'v to admit that looking at the internet most people do not
understand this new medium. Most of the items in the net are 
infos like 'Yes I'm here, my name is so and so, here's my address
and I like this lists of lists'. Real content is often missing 
and hard to find. An additional problem is as that reuse is difficult.
(tradition in science - copyright issues)


A practical consideration
-------------------------
Comparing for example Adobe Acrobats size it seems to
be feasable to distribute a Squeak active essay together with a
considerable rest of the Squeak image along with different VMs.
With the modules now in place it is straightforward to get an new
image down to 10MB (of course 5 MB would be better). 
Bob's Superswiki has about 200 projects. Taking  the really different
ones with some content there are about 20. What is people helding back.
Actually now we just could _write_ Active Essays. 


> > >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 is fascinating

[snip]

Yes, indeed!

Encyclopedic knowledge
----------------------
Are you aware of www.wikipedia.com? An intersting tele-cooperative
open source authoring projects which uses tool-wise rather traditional
techniques but is in IMO an interesting experiment.

In our Squeak context we could think of 'InfoObjects' - objects like
encyclopedia entries which could render themselves in different
perspectives. We could have browsers for them and have them render
themselves in various ways.


This is an interesting discussion. Keep it going! And do not forget
to write more persistent notes as well on the Swiki
http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/.

Referencing Swiki pages - we can edit easily - helps to contextualize
the discussion here.

Finally - why not write a dynamic essay like
Andreas Raab did on Morph layout or Ted Kaehler on some statistics
oriented considerations about evolution. (Although the evolution example
is relatively traditional - a set of HTML-pages together with some
JavaScript would have done the job as well while giving at the same
time better hypertext linking - OK I admit authoring was perhaps faster.)



Hannes Hirzel




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