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From: bzs@std.com (Barry Shein)
Newsgroups: comp.society.futures
Subject: Is DTP Dead?
Message-ID: <8910020315.AA06255@std.com>
Date: 2 Oct 89 03:15:40 GMT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 84


(DTP == DeskTop Publishing)

Well, I don't believe that DTP is dead. But it's clear we may be
currently on a bad evolutionary path.

If you follow the TCP-IP list (discussion of the ARPAnet protocols)
you've been watching a fascinating discussion about how to store the
ARPAnet RFC's (Requests For Comment, that's what they call the
documents which define the networking protocols, it doesn't matter if
you understand this, just that it's several hundred on-line documents
each from one to about twenty-five or so pages on technical subjects
and very important to some people AND freely redistributable.)

A proposal had been made and accepted I guess to allow new RFC's to be
submitted in Postscript (if you don't know what postscript is you
probably should find out, it's a fancy language for creating fancy
documents on fancy printers mostly, and fancy CRT's.) The desire was
to make them prettier to print out and allow the inclusion of fancy
diagrams and/or graphics, the sort of thing Postscript is very good
at.

The problem is that a postscript document is usually generated by some
program and is mostly unreadable to a human and looks like:

	2 p
	%%Page: 2 2
	12 s 0 xH 0 xS 1 f
	2203 384(-)N
	2259(2)X
	2331(-)X
	555 672(Are)N
	733(You)X
	932(There)X
	1191(\(AYT\):)X
	1513(A)X
	1616(way)X
	1810(for)X
	1955(the)X
	2106(user)X

Not very readable although you can find the text if you look hard in
this one, most are much harder. Not obvious if there are any paragraph
breaks etc.

One big problem is that unless you have some very fancy software it's
pretty hard to do something which is easy to do on plain text files
(like this mail message) -- search for certain word patterns,
particularly if you want to search through hundreds of documents
automatically with a program.

Now, it seems like on-line, computerized document repositories are at
least as important as being able to use old english fonts in your
submission to a journal. And if we have on-line libraries than it
would be nice to be able to search them efficiently. Ideally
everything would be indexed but indexes have to be built in advance
and it's not possible to know what anyone might want to ask in
advance. So, sometimes we just have to search the full text body
itself. And it works. But it's much harder if it's in a format
like the above.

Before the clever hackers out there say "gee, I could just throw
something together which turns that into plain text" remember that
you'll also have to figure out things like tables which instead of
looking like:


			 Madison Jefferson  Adams
	Total Votes	| 11,240|   18,220| 9,270

Look something like, well, the stuff I showed you earlier. In text
format a lot of tables are easy to search even if error-prone.

Anyhow, perhaps after all these years of trying to come up with
formats (Postscript isn't the only culprit, in fact its
standardization might help encourage solutions!) which are good on
both printers and screens we missed the point. We actually wanted the
stuff to also be good on computers!

	-Barry Shein

Software Tool & Die, Purveyors to the Trade
1330 Beacon Street, Brookline, MA 02146, (617) 739-0202
Internet: bzs@skuld.std.com  UUCP: uunet!skuld!bzs