Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!intercon!amanda@intercon.com
From: amanda@intercon.com (Amanda Walker)
Newsgroups: comp.society.futures
Subject: Re: Is DTP Dead?
Message-ID: <1476@intercon.com>
Date: 2 Oct 89 17:52:17 GMT
References: <8910020315.AA06255@std.com>
Sender: news@intercon.com
Reply-To: amanda@intercon.com (Amanda Walker)
Organization: InterCon Systems Corporation
Lines: 50

Well, there are a couple of issues here.  The biggest one, I think, is that
for documents such as the RFCs, universal accessibility is very important,
and as popular as PostScript is, there is one and only one universal document
format: line printer text.  There are minor variations, such as using EBCDIC
vs. ASCII, but straight monospaced line-by-line text is the only document
representation that everybody can read, and it is likely to be this way for
a long time.  There are still plenty of 70's vintage CRTs in use out there,
for example.

I have been struggling with this issue myself.  I have written (and my company
is about to start shipping) a Macintosh interface to news (with a mail
interface done by a coworker).  Part of this is a text editing module.  The
only reasons it doesn't handle high-quality text, basic graphics, and so on
are that (a) there's no way for me to send such a message so that anyone
else can read it, and (b) everybody else is sending messages that are
line printer text.

There are two approaches I can think of that can overcome this barrier, and
I don't like either of them :-).  They are based the idea that the document
should be readable and comprehensible if treated as line printer text, but
have more structure if interpreted by a smarter piece of software.  UNIX
does something like this with nroff output, which underlines by using
"underscore-backspace-character" sequences, and boldface by using "character-
backspace-character" sequences.  Both of them look fine on a printer or a
CRT, but a screen viewer that knows how can do appropriate things and show
real underlining (or italics) and boldfacing.

Another example is that if a viewer knows that a document consists of a
stream of paragraphs separated by blank lines (most news articles, for
example), it can reformat the paragraphs themselves, ignoring the line
breaks in the document.

In my opinion, what we need is a simple text-like format that can be printed
off or viewed on a dumb CRT, but that can also be postprocessed into
PostScript or whatever else (this adds extra flexibility, as well--I could,
for example, print RFCs in Garamond Light instead of Times Roman or Courier).

I've thought of a couple of things, such as using "space-backspace" (which
would print or view as a blank line) to toggle between proportional or
monospaced text, and so on.  It's kind of icky, but it would work :-).

The bigggest problem is graphics.  You just can't do graphics on a line
printer (aside from Snoopy calendars :-)).  You might be able to do something
with approximating line drawing with +, -, and | (the way the RFC's do now)
and some rules for turning them back into lines and boxes, but anything
more complex is going to be a bear.

--
Amanda Walker
amanda@intercon.com