atw: Re: XML software for Word-like formatting
- From: James Hunt <jameshunt@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: austechwriter@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 24 Jun 2009 23:02:01 +1000
On 22 Jun 2009, at 11:23 PM, davebgar wrote:
Hi,
I'm an editor looking for an XML publishing package that gives me
flexibility with formatting scientific/technical reports in a way
similar
to MS Word - such as with table formatting, changing pagination for
sections, and incorporating graphics. I'm also considering remote
editing,
where several authors can collaborate on a server-based document
that can
highlight the edits made and who made them. Have read that WebDAV XML
software (on a WebDAV-enabled server) could achieve this. My only XML
experience so far has been with Arbortext EPIC running with
Documentum,
and DocBook schema.
Any suggestions to help narrow down my research on software is most
welcome.
Dave Gardiner
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-------------------
This request covers a great deal of ground.
In the technical writing field as we know it, products like ArborText
Epic are used in larger enterprises for book and report production.
Authors work in text editors, and produce ASCII text files. Text may
be tagged, usually by selecting opening and closing tags from various
menus, in accordance with various rules, and the result - still an
ASCII text file - is fed to a typesetter, which uses the TeX engine
to produce the formatted version of the document, in PDF. The tags
comprise a dialect of XML. The database program behind everything
(often Documentum) can keep track of changes made, versions, and so
on. The text file in which the author works is reconstructed from
tagged elements and presented to the author by the database program,
and this process is transparent. By issuing suitable instructions, a
publisher could produce multiple editions of a book from the database
of versions of tagged elements, by specifying selection rules for
those tagged elements.
ArborText Epic is ruinously expensive to buy, and hard to maintain in
production. From a writer's point of view, though, it is very easy to
use. If you can afford it, Epic+Documentum would meet your
requirements. Otherwise, you will have to devise your own toolchain.
There is, AFAIK, no freeware equivalent of Epic+Documentum, but the
general idea of feeding tagged ASCII text to a typesetting program
has been around since the Stone Age of Computing, when the freeware
TeX typesetting system was devised in 1978 or thereabouts. (TeX is
used by ArborText Epic for its typesetting.)
In the book and journal publishing world, the tools used by writers
and editors of scientific, technical, and medical (STM) works vary by
subject area. In equation-rich fields such as mathematics, physics,
and some branches of engineering, LaTeX (a version of the
aforementioned TeX), reigns supreme. Authors write text files and
insert their own tags, and can typeset their own work. For detailed
information, downloads, and free introductory texts, see http://
www.tug.org.
This is a world where WYSIWYG is practically unknown, and Microsoft
Word is a toy for secretaries.
LaTeX is not an XML dialect. LaTeX and friends, such as its newer
cousin ConTeXt, have features that make XML folk nervous: for
example, the frequent termination of commands by blanks, and the fact
that structural tags can double as processing commands.
Major book and journal publishers use tag converters to produce XML-
tagged versions of LaTeX-coded works, for archival purposes: Google
"LaTeX to XML" for more information.
Representing mathematics is straightforward in LaTeX, but not in XML.
There is an XML dialect called MathML, which was originally designed
for displaying equations on Web pages. In comparison with LaTeX code,
MathML is blindingly verbose, and few writers use MathML directly.
LaTeX to MathML tag converters are available. Again, Google.
Many writers of Web pages with mathematics get around the verbosity
problem by inserting little JPG images of equations that were
produced by LaTeX utilities; see, for example:
http://www.cmmp.ucl.ac.uk/~ajf/course_notes/node42.html
On that page, the ALT data for the images comprises the LaTeX code
used to generate the images, but there is no real sense in which the
mathematics is part of the structure of the page.
A good general reference on LaTeX, XML, etc. is:
Goossens, M. and Rahtz, S.: "The LaTeX Web Companion: Integrating
TeX, HTML, and XML" (Addison-Wesley, 1999). ISBN: 0 201 43311 7.
JH
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