On Oct 11, 2008, at 10:55 AM, Michael Adams wrote:
On Sat, 11 Oct 2008 09:11:46 -0400
Came this utterance fomulated by Douglas St.Clair to my mailbox:
On Oct 11, 2008, at 7:16 AM, Michael Adams wrote:
<snip>
I think Scribus is trying to become this more than OO.o, or Docbook or
LaTeX is. Historically a word processor processes words. These words
are
then made available to print houses with expensive DTP programs that
format the text just-so. The gap has closed somewhat but feature creep
has to be balanced against bloat somewhere.
This is a work flow issue not a functionality issue. The workflow you
describe is part of what you see for magazines. Actually it goes like
this. There is a a creative fellow who gets paid a lot of money to
design each new magazine. They are all independent to the best of my
knowledge. They decide the number of columns, justified or not,
typeface, font, etc for each section of the magazine. Their product is
a series of templates and each issue the staffers at the magazine pour
the content into those templates. A writer is the only part of the
team that does what you suggest use a word processor to create
content. There are artists that do the covers, graphics and ads for
each issue they use different tools. The templates are loaded most
commonly into QuarkXPress and the content positioned in it.
There is a fairly substantial group of people, Desktop Publishers,
preparing newsletters and advertisements that require the whole
workflow from design to production is done on one computer.
Unfortunately people think of Adobe InDesign, PageMaker, FrameMaker,
and QuarkXPress as essentially the same save for the feature set.
Actually this isn't true. Adobe InDesign and Pagemaker are the best
for setting up something like a bunch of unique documents of about
20-100 pages (i.e. newsletters for example). QuarkXPress is for folks
who are truly anal about the placement of stuff. Sure you can position
a graphic within maybe 1000th of a point but let me assure you some
woman reading her People Magazine under the dryer is not going to know
if an image is 500ths of a point out of position. FrameMaker is a
bear, but it handles books and book sets with all the cross-
referencing, indexing, tables, etc you could want. You definitely
wouldn't want to use it to layout a bunch of unique and radically
stylish newsletters day after day. In other words I see three major
'markets' (or needs). There is the SOHO or DTP that needs to do
everything and they want it to be fresh and original. The business
that in order mostly needs to write, calculate, illustrate, present,
bulk mail, etc. The student that needs the same features as the
business and in addition the ability to cross-reference, index, etc
relatively short documents. The publisher of large documents that
needs everything the student does but also needs a stable platform for
huge documents. (I have been reading a lot of complaints from Doctoral
candidates who have had Word trash their thesis when it gets past
about 100 pages.)
Think of it as a cross with one axis being large documents <> short
documents and the other axis flexible <> structured. Using the
examples from above I see the existing commercial products.
Item Length & ease of use
InDesign short & flexible
PageMaker short & flexible
FrameMaker long & structured
QuarkXPress short & structured
<snip>
Requests for Features and Enhancements (RFE's) are handled by the same
software and website that handles bugs[i]. Accepted Features require
knowledge (to write), sufficient votes, programmer input (to get it
written) and integration (often between several diferrent crews doing
several different jobs around and within the program. OO.o has a
roadmap
of features it intends to integrate over time[ii].
I don't see a vision that maps to a set of uses more a group of
applications and a features list. Is this correct?
<snip>
Yeah, you've got it. As each letter corresponds to a number, sorting
is
generally easy. Throw in a number for an obscure glyph which
represents
two letters and sorting gets thrown off beam. Now copy and paste your
word into calc, is it meant to handle them? Then throw it into an
external database like MySQL, we know it won't handle them.
The problem with extending the character set is making sure all the
applications it touches don't get broken.
<snip>
Postscript is Apples baby, they tend to hold their babies pretty
close.
OpenType may be a better format[iv]. Must admit, i'm getting into
another grey area here.
I see it a little differently. There is a bitmapped world and a vector
world. MS chose bitmapped although they have sort of graphed the
vector world on to it so that now its sort of like a wart growing on a
cancer. With Macintosh Apple jumped right into the vector world. The
main advantage of bitmapped over vector is it is cheap and fast. Cheap
in part because the peripherals don't need to be as smart. Vector is
more expensive (printers with computers built in to raster the vector
shapes) but the result is a scaleable output that maps optimally to
the output device.
<snip>
Hmm, never tried to write a font. Apparently hundreds of hours are
involved in writing a good one, what with Latin with accents,
Cyrillic, Arabic, Hebrew all taking precedence over ligatures.
Whipping
up a quick glyph for an ameteur like me (even though i understand some
vector graphic principles and know what an x height, descender, and em
space mean) is probably beyond me. I did however do a 8byte bitmap
font
glyph or two on my Vic20 with its 5kB RAM twenty something years
back -
boring as stink.
It's not hard to create a font with a commercial tool like
Fontographer or an open source one like FontForge.
--
St. Doug, Tigger and Puppy in our memory.
Tir na nOg
Wilton, NH USA
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