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Re: facemenu-unlisted-faces


From: Robert J. Chassell
Subject: Re: facemenu-unlisted-faces
Date: Thu, 13 Jul 2006 10:49:09 +0000 (UTC)

Sascha Wilde wrote

   Edited text should be marked up semantically, not by means of
   concrete visual properties.

Yes.  Also, for at least twenty years, WYSIWYG has meant producing at
least two output formats from the same input.   Nowadays -- that is to
say, for more than a decade -- it means WYSAH, `what you see and hear ...'

Although currently a Texinfo file can be converted directly to seven
output formats, in practice, only three are needed:

  * Info for efficient on-line reading and hearing,

  * HTML for high resolution but less efficient on-line reading, and.

  * DVI, for off-line printing, which can be viewed on-line
    inefficiently.

(You can also directly produce plain text, PDF, DocBook, and XML with
a Texinfo DTD and indirectly produce PostScript, RTF, and LaTeX, plus
others; but the three I mention tell us a great deal.)

Thus, WYSAHIWYG text formatting needs to show visually the three
output formats and enable you to listen as well as see one of them.
(The eyes' free format not only helps the permanently blind, it is
becoming more and more important for people, like other car drivers,
who become situationally blind if they take their eyes off the road,
which we do not wish.)

(Texinfo is not the only input format from which it is easy to produce
multiple output formats.  DebianDoc does the same.  It is one of the
XML formats.)

As a practical matter, everything Drew Adams discusses must work with
these output formats that come from a single input.  To do anything
else is to show incompetence.  It is not easy.

-- 
    Robert J. Chassell                         
    address@hidden                         GnuPG Key ID: 004B4AC8
    http://www.rattlesnake.com                  http://www.teak.cc




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