On 21/04/15 18:18, Dmitri Zagidulin wrote:
I strongly believe that the WYSIWYG editing route is a fundamentally worse approach for documentation (and textbooks) than text-based formatting such as Pillar, Markdown and Asciidoc.
I have a lot of experience using both. The best experience I've had using Framemaker. Comparing it to Word is a soemwhat similar experience to explaining non-smalltalkers about image-based development.
Specifically, it will result in less community contribution, and it will make distributed version control of documents much harder.
There is actually no reason why that should be the case, especially when using semantic markup. I agree that there are lots of WYSIWYG programs that make it difficult.
Instead of going the route that you propose (which essentially attempts to Word or Google Docs in-image),
My worst experiences with large documents were using Word. It is designed for small documents, and it took Microsoft 10 years to make bullet lists work.
Side-by-side instant preview makes it possible to have the best of both worlds, text-based markup and WYSIWYG, without the typical WYSIWYG drawbacks (of making distributed version control difficult, first and foremost).
I have used side-by-side instant preview since it became available (Textures on a Macintosh SE/30). Nice for maths, not for large documents.
2) Version control, especially with more than one or two collaborators, is a *nightmare* with WYSIWYG tools. Look at what the state of the art is, at what Microsoft's Word and Google's Docs have been able to accomplish, in terms of revision control.
Neither are state of the art. Both are designed for small documents.
Despite unimaginable amounts of person-hours of development put into it, it's pretty much unusable
I fully agree that the collaboration features of Word are unusable. Word is feature checklist driven.
We are not Microsoft or Google. We are not going to solve the WYSIWYG source control / version control problem better than they are.
4) The ability to render source text-based markup into multiple formats (PDF, HTML, etc), is *essential*. Going from WYSIWYG to HTML is impossible (all attempts to do so, by Microsoft, Adobe, etc, have utterly failed).
Repurposing is something Adobe still sells Framemaker for on Windows. Works perfectly fine. Even has an API.
Whereas going from text-based to print/PDF is very doable (see LaTeX, the entirety of HTML ecosystem, Pillar, etc). This is a serious problem that FrameMaker never had to solve.
It is solved by Framemaker. That is an expensive product, so there are not too many people knowing it. Stephan
