Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uwm.edu!gem.mps.ohio-state.edu!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!std.com!bzs 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