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author | Norbert Preining <norbert@preining.info> | 2019-09-02 13:46:59 +0900 |
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committer | Norbert Preining <norbert@preining.info> | 2019-09-02 13:46:59 +0900 |
commit | e0c6872cf40896c7be36b11dcc744620f10adf1d (patch) | |
tree | 60335e10d2f4354b0674ec22d7b53f0f8abee672 /usergrps/uktug/baskervi/5_1/burnard.tex |
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diff --git a/usergrps/uktug/baskervi/5_1/burnard.tex b/usergrps/uktug/baskervi/5_1/burnard.tex new file mode 100644 index 0000000000..375b1ea486 --- /dev/null +++ b/usergrps/uktug/baskervi/5_1/burnard.tex @@ -0,0 +1,178 @@ +\title{Portable documents: Acrobat, SGML and \TeX} +\author[Lou Burnard]{Lou Burnard\\Oxford University Computing Service\\\texttt{lou@vax.ox.ac.uk}} +\article +\begin{multicols}{2} + + \noindent This joint meeting of the UK \TeX{} Users Group and the +BCS Electronic Publishing Specialist Group in London on January 19th +attracted a large and mixed audience of academics, \TeX{} hackers, +publishers, and software developers, with representatives from most +UK organizations active in the field of electronic publishing and +document management. I was expecting rather more disagreement about +the relative merits of the various approaches now available for the +creation of portable documents; in the event, the path of SGML-based +righteousness, with appropriate concessions to the practical merits +of PostScript-based systems, was apparently endorsed by the +consensus. + +First of the seven speakers was David Brailsford from Nottingham +University, who described Adobe's Acrobat as `a \emph{de facto} industry +standard'. His presentation of exactly how the various components of +this product worked together, and could be made to interact with both +\LaTeX{} and SGML, was very clear and refreshingly free of hype. The +choice of PDF (which is effectively a searchable and structured form of +Postscript, in which logical structure and hypertextual links are +preserved along with the imaging information) as an archival format was +a pragmatic one for journals such as EPodd where fidelity to every +detail of presentation was crucial. The availability of a free Acrobat +reader was also a plus point. He characterized the difficulties of +mapping the logical links of a \LaTeX{} or SGML document on to the +physical links instantiated in a PDF document as a classic case of the +importance of `late binding', and revealed the open secret that +Adobe's free PDF reader would soon be upgraded to recognise and act on +HTML-style anchors. A demonstration of the Acrobat-based electronic +journal project CAJUN is already available online at +\texttt{http://quill.cs.nott.ac.uk/} + +David Barron, from Southampton, gave an excellent overview of what +exactly is implied by the phrase `portable document'. Documents are not +files, but compound objects, combining text, images and time-based media. +There is a growing awareness that electronic resources should be +regarded as virtual documents, repositories of information from which +many different actual documents may be generated. These developments +all make `portability' (defined as the ability to render documents -- +with varying degrees of visual fidelity -- in different hardware or +software environments) very difficult. Portability was of crucial +importance, not only for publishers wishing to distribute in the +electronic medium, and not only for specific user communities wishing +to pool information, but also for all of us. Information available only +in a non-portable electronic form was information at the mercy of +technological change. He cited as portability success stories the +widespread use of PostScript and \LaTeX{} as a distribution medium by the +research community, referring to the Physics preprint library at Los +Alamos as a case where this had now become the normal method of +publication. By contrast, the success of the World Wide Web seemed to +be partly due to its use of a single markup language (HTML) which +effectively takes rendering concerns entirely out of the hands of +authors. From the archival point of view, however, none of the +available standards seemed a natural winner: hypertext was still too +immature a technology, and there were still many intractable problems +in handling multiple fonts and character sets. Professor Barron +concluded with a brief summary of the merits of SGML as providing a +formal, verifiable and portable definition for a document's structure, +mentioning in passing that Southampton are developing a TEI-based +document archive with conversion tools going in both directions +betweeen SGML and RTF, and SGML and \LaTeX{}. Looking to the future, he saw +the IBM/Apple Opendoc architecture as offering the promise of genuinely +portable dynamic documents, which could be archived in an SGML form once +static. + +The third speaker of the morning, Jonathan Fine, began by insisting +that the spaces between words were almost as important as the words +themselves. I felt that he wasted rather a lot of his time on +this point, as he did later on explaining how to pronounce `\TeX' +(surely unnecessary for this audience) before finally describing a +product he is developing called `Simsim' (Arabic for sesame, which is a +trademark of British Petroleum we learned). This appears to be a set of +\TeX\ macros for formatting SGML documents directly, using components of +the ESIS to drive the formatter, but I did not come away with any clear +sense of how his approach differed from that already fairly widely +used elsewhere. + +Peter Flynn, from University College Cork, did his usual excellent job +of introducing the Wondrous Web World, focussing inevitably on some of +its shortcomings from the wider SGML perspective, while holding out the +promise that there is a real awareness of the need to address them. +What the Web does best, in addition to storage and display of portable +documents, is to provide ways of hypertextually linking them. Its +success raises important and difficult issues about the nature of +publishing in the electronic age: who should control the content and +appearance of documents -- the user, the browser vendor, or the +originator? Publishing on the Web also raises a whole range of +fundamental and so far unresolved problems in the area of intellectual +property rights, despite the availability of effective authentication +and charging mechanisms. He highlighted some well-known `attitude' +problems -- not only are most existing HTML documents invalid, but +no-one really cares -- and concluded that the availability of better +browsers, capable of handling more sophisticated DTDs, needed to be +combined with better training of the Web community for these to be +resolved. + +The three remaining presentations, we were told after a lunch in +spartan surroundings, would focus on the real world, which seemed a little +harsh on the previous speakers. Geeti Granger from John Wiley described +the effect on a hard-pressed production department of going over to the +use of SGML in the creation of an eight volume Chemical Encyclopaedia. +Her main conclusions appeared to be that it had necessitated more +managerial involvement than anticipated, largely because of the +increased complexity of the production process. She attributed this +partly to the need for document analysis, proper data flow procedures, +progress reports etc., though why these should be a consequence of +using SGML I did not fully understand. More persuasively, she reported +the difficulty the project had had in finding SGML-aware suppliers, in +designing a DTD in advance of the material it described, in agreeing on +an appropriate level of encoding and in getting good quality typeset +output. + +Martin Key, from Elsevier, described in some detail the rationale and +operation of the Computer Aided Production system used for Elsevier's +extensive stable of academic journals. Authors are encouraged to submit +material in a variety of electronic forms, including \LaTeX{}, for which +Elsevier provide a generic style sheet. Other formats are converted and +edited using an inhouse SGML-aware system (apparently implemented in +WordPerfect 5, though I may have misheard this). This uses their own +DTD, based on Majour, with extensions for maths, which seemed to be a +major source of difficulty. Documents will be archived in SGML or PDF +in something called an electronic warehouse, of which no details were +vouchsafed. Both PDF and SGML were seen as entirely appropriate formats +for online journals, CD-ROM and other forms of electronic delivery. The +advantages of SGML lay in its independence of the vagaries of +technological development, and its greater potential. However, +potential benefits always had to be weighed against current costs; like +any other business, Elsevier was not interested in experimentation for +its own sake. + +The last speaker was Michael Popham, formerly of the SGML Project at +Exeter, and now of the CTI Centre for Textual Studies at Oxford. His +presentation did a fairly thorough demolition job on the popular notion +that there is still not much SGML-aware software in the world, starting +with a useful overview of the SGML context -- the ways in which SGML +tools might fit into particular parts of an enterprise -- and then +listing a number of key products organized by category. It was nice to +hear the names of so many real SGML products (auto-taggers, authoring +aids, page layout systems, transformation tools, document management +systems, browsers and parsers) being aired, after a long day obsessed +by Acrobat and \LaTeX{}. He concluded with a useful list of places where +up-to-date product information can be found, and a reminder that the +field is rapidly expanding, with new tools appearing all the time. + +The day concluded with an informal panel session, onto which I was +press ganged, which effectively prevented me from taking notes, but +also gave me the chance to promote the recently-published DynaText +version of the TEI Guidelines, which I did shamelessly. I also remember +Malcolm Clark asking, tongue firmly in cheek, why everyone couldn't +just use Word, and being somewhat agreeably surprised by the number of +people in the audience who were able to tell him the answer, and in no +uncertain terms. Other topics addressed included auto-tagging, whether +maths and formulae should be encoded descriptively or presentationally, +whether Microsoft will still be around in the next century, and whether +we would ever learn how to format documents for electronic presentation +as well as we could on paper. + +\makeatletter +\@signature +\makeatother + +\vspace{12pt} + +\begin{quote} + \emph{Editor's note:} Jonathan Fine contacted \BV\ to say that he + feels Lou Burnard's report (which was posted to the Text Encoding + Initiative list) misrepresents his talk, misstating its + central thesis regarding the space between words. Jonathan asks + readers to reserve judgement until an article based on his talk is + published in \BV. In the meantime he will send a copy of the OHP + slides to anyone who asks. +\end{quote} + +\end{multicols} |