NeXTstep is far more than just the Dock. Some of the advantages which it affords:
- Display PostScript --- true WYSIWYG, and the ability to do rich on-screen stuff like display (auto-updating) dimension lines in a drawing program by just typing up some PostScript code.
- Services --- these allow any app to take advantage of any other app which provides a Service. There're Services for sorting text, convert TeX source to in-place graphical equations, printing envelopes &c.
- Customizable UI --- tear off menus allows one to decide which command is most easily available and where it's available at.
- Dynamic run-time binding means that installing a filter service affords said capabilities to any other app, w/o recompiling.
William (who misses NeXT's vertical menu, Display PostScript, Webster.app, pop-up main menu, concise shortcut descriptors and lots of other things on his PowerMac G4 at work in Mac OS X, and appreciates them greatly on his NeXT Cube at home;)
Re:whereas those who *do* understand it
on
Hacking OpenOffice
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· Score: 1
I dunno. The ideas are interesting, but it's hard to take seriously a typographic tool for which a serious effort isn't made to produce beautiful sample documents.
Where's the Lout equivalent to the TeX Showcase? http://www.tug.org/texshowcase (ob. discl. some stuff from my portfolio is in there).
I mean the pages on the documentation (expert.pdf) don't even balance, it's rife w/ widows and orphans (breaking a two-line paragraph!?!), the index allows a single entry to be carried over to the next page, and the columns don't balance on the last page.
Granted, it's not as egregious as Blatner's book on Quark XPress 6 where he breaks ``didn't'' after the second ``d'' (and complains of the New York Times breaking ``doesn't'' after the ``s'' ``...but it's a newspaper...''), and lots of other typographic faux paus, but it's not encouraging to the person considering using it.
Well, Jobs knew enough about electronic design to work at for Nolan Bushnell early on at Atari and it's not like he was hanging around the homebrew computer club with an expectation of finding a product.
There was an article in NeXTWorld which noted he used to scavenge electronics to build things when he was in high school---not finding at the moment, but I believe there're on-line archives of NeXTWorld listed at John Mark Ockerbloom's ``Online Books Page''.
My first book at my day job was 2,200 pages. The project I just finished had almost 5,000 graphics and was over 1,000 pages.
How long do you think it'd take you to paginate _Calendrical Tabulations_ in InDesign?
Where is a decent equation editor for Adobe InDesign?
Have you ever had to do a college-level math or physics textbook?
How about creating an automated typesetting system such as http://custompub.aimsapp.com ?
InDesign is a fine tool, but it's limited by what Adobe and plug-in manufacturers make for it (I checked --- you can't get at Skia's weight and width axes, nor its alternates, nor ligatures beyond the f-ligatures in the AAT version of Zapfino or Hoefler Text), or available man-power/time. Your work doesn't require you to go beyond these limits---mine does. Moreover, I don't see how your opinion on a tool can be valid if you're not capable of using it fully.
Here're a couple of pieces from my portfolio:
http://members.aol.com/willadams/portfolio/typog ra phy/peace_on_earth.pdf
http://members.aol.com/willadams/portfolio/typog ra phy/i_am_your_flag.pdf
http://members.aol.com/willadams/portfolio/typog ra phy/thebookoftea.pdf
http://members.aol.com/willadams/portfolio/typog ra phy/typefaceterminology.pdf
http://members.aol.com/willadams/portfolio/typog ra phy/onetype.pdf
What about the part where you didn't take into consideration that if I'm using Windows, I have to remember to _not_ do option-shift-hyphen and instead hold down the alt key and strike 0151 on the keypad (unless its a machine I've installed AllChars for Windows in which case it's tap the right control key, m, then -). It's a lot easier to just always use --- and either trust TeX to get it right, or search-replace at the end of the project.
Funny you should mention calendars --- ever hear of a book called _Calendrical Tabulations_?
`` - is it compatble w/ the equation editor in Claris/AppleWorks? Is it able to grant finer control over equations?''
should've read something like, `` - is it compatble w/ the equation editor in Claris/AppleWorks for legacy documents? (LaTeX2e is nice enough to offer a compatibility mode for 2.09 which goes _way_ back) Is it able to grant finer control over equations? (esp. in terms of aligning related equations which have text in them).
A typical, naive user won't be able to tell the difference between how they use LyX and how they use Word. LyX is a graphical front-end to LaTeX which allows access to much of LaTeX's power. Granted Word has capabilitied not present in LyX (revision tracking is a good example).
Pages is a program I've looked forward to and argued for for a long while --- however, a couple of quick questions on its capabilities:
- is it compatble w/ the equation editor in Claris/AppleWorks? Is it able to grant finer control over equations?
- is there a way for a template designer to specify styles for use in specific areas of a documents without requiring user intervention? (say if one wants proportional old-style figures in text, monospaced old-style figures in tables, and proportional lining figures in running heads)
- is there an easy way to ask that a paragraph run a line longer or shorter _if_ doing so doesn't exceed a certain ``badness''
- how about running an entire chapter long or short?
All of the above is trivial in TeX/LaTeX/ConTeXt.
Hyphens for en / em dashes. I move constantly from Windows to Mac to Unix boxes. Using hyphens (two for en dashes, three for ems) allows me to unambiguously represent them. It's a standard which was also present in PageMaker. It's also slightly faster to tap a key thrice than to do a three-key combination (for me at least).
Unfortunately, InDesign, Illustrator and PhotoShop are the only mainstream apps which fully support OpenType font access, a thing which I've railed about for a long while, but before these apps existed / had these capabilities, I've been using TeX to get contextual ligatures. You may've had the leisure of waiting for these apps, but I've got stuff in my print portfolio dating back to 1989, and I wasn't willing to compromise on not having old-style figures, f-ligatures &c.
Does InDesign support contextual ligatures for AAT fonts? XeTeX lets me access _all_ of Skia's features (and Zapfino's and Hoefler Text's, and for the latter two I don't have to ``upgrade'' to the OpenType versions), including its weight and width axes. I know InDesign 2 doesn't---haven't had a chance to try CS.
If TeX is obsolete, then where is the high-end equation editor for InDesign? How does one do publications like
or create a system like http://custompub.aimsapp.com
Or consider the simple matter of a child's Rebus story --- is it reasonable to double-click on the glyph palette for _every_ image?
http://www.tug.org/TUGboat/Articles/tb24-2/tb77a da ms.pdf
Lessee, I've provided links to books, a poster, and various presentations --- got any links to a textual document which can't be done in TeX?
The difference in our attitude is that before I pass judgement on a tool, I learn how to use it, and evaluate _all_ of its limitations. TeX is the first layout tool I've found whose _only_ limitation is (my) human ingenuity. Quark is limited by what people find profitable to create as XTensions, InDesign by what's available as plug-ins, Pages has the advantage of being able to use Services, but even so, you can't do arbitrarily complex things in it w/o an unacceptable amount of effort. You may find that acceptable, but for my work, it's not.
Using LyX (which is a graphical front-end for LaTeX) doesn't require any programming / coding at all. It's essentially indistinguishable from Word in usage.
I'm interested in being able to do anything I want in a reasonable fashion --- I don't consider things like doing search-replace in an XPress Tags file to insert ligatures from an Expert font reasonable, nor is having to access the glyph palette in InDesign to insert alternates for Zapfino or Hoefler Text reasonable either.
Good enough isn't, and I want a tool without limitations --- Quark can't make a hyper-linked.pdf of multi-file document, InDesign can't typeset equations or manage large documents. That said, InDesign is certainly the best graphical page layout program currently available, and the Pages module in iWork is a worth successor to the NeXT program Pages by Pages, Inc.
I'm not saying that TeX should be used for all things, merely that it's the best tool for the sort of things I do for the most part (though I do use some other tools for things in my portfolio, see http://members.aol.com/willadams ), and overall a tool worth considering, and one which can be reasonably adapted to pretty much any project if need be.
By contrast, to return to the topic at hand --- how does one get XML through InDesign to get a typeset page with as little human intervention as possible? Is there any better tool for automation than AppleScript? What if one wants to deploy on a Windows box?
On the bright side, TeX does get HZ capabilities in pdftex --- see HTH's doctoral thesis (Adobe very generously provided a grant to aid him in his stufies).
ConTeXt is way cool, and I agree it's one of the best things in the TeX world, and I'm glad of the variety of choice.
There's no need to write macros to do basic tasks --- or even code for that matter, look at http://www.lyx.org for an example of a tool which enables this.
XeTeX handles Unicode just as well as Pages does --- uses the same Quartz mechanism and Mac OS X input methods / keyboard layouts.
Pages has an on-line help file, no? And of course, there'll be lots of books like, _iWork Pages: The Missing Manual_ --- but if it's so wonderful at imbuing typographic principles why do a lot of the documents shown in screen grabs have lines which are too long for their typesize (many seem to be more than three alphabets long, which is at least half an alphabet too many).
Taking over the world doesn't matter to me. Being correct does.
TeX is the most-flexible, least-limited typesetting tool available, and far more suited to my own work and working style than XPress or InDesign (both of which I use at work). While XPress and InDesign are both serviceable enough, they're not customizable / programmable enough for all situations, especially those involving long texts or repetition (which is much of what typography is).
IME it's more like the boss calls you in, states that you were correct in your complaints about the company they tried to outsource the latest project to, that it's a miserable failure and hopeless unless you can salvage it.
Six weeks of sixty to eighty-hour work-weeks later the project was back on track.
It wouldn't be so bad if I'd not accepted a salaried position...
Except that an Adobe employee confirmed my statement that InDesign's H&J is based on TeX's by way of URW's HZ algorithm --- you really don't think Adobe licensed HZ from URW to not use it?
As regards Unicode --- while it's true Omega has gone dormant there're two viable successors:
- Aleph - a direct combination of Omega and e-TeX
- XeTeX - a Mac OS X-specific variant able to use OpenType and AAT fonts
What H&J algorithm are you going to be using in XML:FO?
How are you going to control for widows and orphans and getting nice, even, balanced pages?
What about running pages (or chapters!) long or short at need?
How are you going to handle equations? Write them up by hand using MathML? You are aware that MathML is intended solely as an interchange format, and that there's nothing sane about a person attempting to type it up by hand?
Second, it's only recently that Quark has been able to use anything other than a lousy bitmap preview for placed art. The majority of XPress users never upgraded from v4, and so get cruddy bitmaps (unless they license an XTension which then litters their HD w/ preview files) and a weird shift from nice anti-aliased type to blocky bitmaps when editing text at certain sizes).
Thirdly, Quark is incredibly limited in terms of the glyphs which it can access, so What You See Is All You're Going to Get, and you ain't gonna automatically get spiffy ligatures in it from OpenType and AAT fonts (manually inserting ligatures pulled in from ``Expert fonts'' is _so_ 20th century (and something I found tedious immediately after purchasing Adobe Garamond back in 1989) and fixing them by search-replacing in XPress Tags is a poor solution).
And lastly, Quark still has a brain-dead, one-line at at time H&J algorithm --- at least Adobe had the sense to make use of TeX's algorithm when they developed InDesign.
I submit that if one understands TeX (and LaTeX) and works with them as they are intended to be adjusted, that there's really no limit to what one can do, or what one can make things look like.
In support of this, I offer the TeX Showcase at http://www.tug.org/texshowcase.
(ob. discl. it includes some stuff from my personal portfolio at http://members.aol.com/willadams)
Even bad typography can be mimicked as is shown in a (thankfully unreleased) package to mimic Word's typography.
Another document done with TeX (well, Omega) is at
http://www.tug.org/tug2003/donate/
Duane Bibby did the drawing, I did the layout and typesetting.
Even the age-old complaint of Computer Modern being the only easily-usable font has fallen by the wayside w/ Jonathan Kew's wonderful XeTeX variant for Mac OS X ( available at http://scripts.sil.org/xetex ) and Will Robertson's nifty fontspec package ( http://www.mecheng.adelaide.edu.au/~will/tex/ ).
I challenge you to find a better on-line text on a tool for typography than Peter Wilson's manual for his Memoir documentclass ( http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/contr ib/memoir/memman.pdf ).
If you're not managing to get things done in TeX as you might wish, you've only yourself to blame---for my part, I was very glad to discover TeX and in it a tool with no limitations other than human ingenuity.
But the original intent w/ the Web was wiki-like as well---worldwideweb.app on a NeXT Cube allowed one to browse _and_ edit---it was only when Mosaic was released that one had a graphical Web Browser which was crippled to only browse.
Tim Berners-Lee discusses this in his nifty book _Weaving the Web_ (which also has a cameo by Ted Nelson) as well as a brief bit where he notes he was writing early drafts of the book in NaviPress (a browser which was also an editor) which later became AOLpress.
William (who was really glad when Nvu came along and offered a decent visual editor which can publish to AOL servers since AOL took away the http-put feature which AOLpress used)
My opinion is based on what I read in NeXTWorld and other industry publications, but as the divorce lawyers say, ``There're three sides to every story, his, hers and the truth.'' --- certainly didn't mean to claim that my observations were absolutely authoritative and final, but my understanding based on what I'd read.
I did note ``the implosion of the NeXT market and the shift to custom / vertical apps'' though...
Not sure by what you mean by the ``VC interaction on the board'', but it doesn't sound pleasant.
The skunkworks Windows effort sounds interesting though, and glad to hear that something of it survived in other projects.
- being vapourware and _very_ late to market
- never providing a promised interactive/visual design tool
- the implosion of the NeXT market and the shift to custom / vertical apps
- Altsys Virtuoso (developed by the people who'd done FreeHand) getting page layout features
- Glenn Reid writing PasteUp.app in his basement over the course of a summer
All of the above wasn't helped by Ted Shelton's company ITS being shafted on the Enterprise Object Frameworks license over their web-app development software (to give NeXT a leg-up w/ Web Objects).
It seems to me a lot more straight-forward for this family to merely contact all friends of the deceased and ask that they forward any e-mails to / from said person which they wish to share.
I'm using OpenStep on the Sparcstation 'cause that was what I last installed and I'd thought it'd be easier to set up (and management shot down my idea of getting an Xserver or even a second PowerMac G5 w/ Mac OS X Server).... then I actually started looking into it and trying to get connections &c. setup, and it's just not working thus far.
Will using Linux or FreeBSD be reasonably easy to set up?
I've been looking into setting up a Sparcstation running OpenStep 4.2 here at work as a Netinfo Server, but keep coming across reports of people not being able to connect which is a bit off-putting.
I'd be willing to use FreeBSD or Linux though if it could be set up easily (and inexpensively!) enough.
William
Re:Biggest LOTR bug of all was their "Quick Hit"!?
on
Top 50 DVDs
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· Score: 1
I dunno. I think leaving out the Barrow Wights (and Tom Bombadil to extricate them from it) removes a lot of meaning from Eowyn and Merriman's encounter with the Lord of the Ringwraiths. ``Glad indeed would he who wrought that blade been to have known its ultimate fate for chief among the enemies of his folk were the Witch King of Angmar.'' or something like that. Also a shame since it cuts Pippin's heroics down quite a bit.
Agree reusing Arwen isn't so bad --- though still kind of a shame since it gives short shrift to Glorfindel, an elf who returned from the Halls of Mandos to continue his struggle against Sauron in Middle Earth.
Probably the LaTeX access would be more along the lines of how one can get to LaTeX from OmniOutliner by exporting to an XML schema for which there is a converter to LaTeX.
Slashdot Mirror
NeXTstep is far more than just the Dock. Some of the advantages which it affords:
;)
- Display PostScript --- true WYSIWYG, and the ability to do rich on-screen stuff like display (auto-updating) dimension lines in a drawing program by just typing up some PostScript code.
- Services --- these allow any app to take advantage of any other app which provides a Service. There're Services for sorting text, convert TeX source to in-place graphical equations, printing envelopes &c.
- Customizable UI --- tear off menus allows one to decide which command is most easily available and where it's available at.
- Dynamic run-time binding means that installing a filter service affords said capabilities to any other app, w/o recompiling.
William
(who misses NeXT's vertical menu, Display PostScript, Webster.app, pop-up main menu, concise shortcut descriptors and lots of other things on his PowerMac G4 at work in Mac OS X, and appreciates them greatly on his NeXT Cube at home
I dunno. The ideas are interesting, but it's hard to take seriously a typographic tool for which a serious effort isn't made to produce beautiful sample documents.
Where's the Lout equivalent to the TeX Showcase? http://www.tug.org/texshowcase (ob. discl. some stuff from my portfolio is in there).
I mean the pages on the documentation (expert.pdf) don't even balance, it's rife w/ widows and orphans (breaking a two-line paragraph!?!), the index allows a single entry to be carried over to the next page, and the columns don't balance on the last page.
Granted, it's not as egregious as Blatner's book on Quark XPress 6 where he breaks ``didn't'' after the second ``d'' (and complains of the New York Times breaking ``doesn't'' after the ``s'' ``...but it's a newspaper...''), and lots of other typographic faux paus, but it's not encouraging to the person considering using it.
William
Well, Jobs knew enough about electronic design to work at for Nolan Bushnell early on at Atari and it's not like he was hanging around the homebrew computer club with an expectation of finding a product.
There was an article in NeXTWorld which noted he used to scavenge electronics to build things when he was in high school---not finding at the moment, but I believe there're on-line archives of NeXTWorld listed at John Mark Ockerbloom's ``Online Books Page''.
William
What's the largest project you've ever worked on?
g ra phy/peace_on_earth.pdf
g ra phy/i_am_your_flag.pdf
g ra phy/thebookoftea.pdf
g ra phy/typefaceterminology.pdf
g ra phy/onetype.pdf
My first book at my day job was 2,200 pages. The project I just finished had almost 5,000 graphics and was over 1,000 pages.
How long do you think it'd take you to paginate _Calendrical Tabulations_ in InDesign?
Where is a decent equation editor for Adobe InDesign?
Have you ever had to do a college-level math or physics textbook?
How about creating an automated typesetting system such as http://custompub.aimsapp.com ?
InDesign is a fine tool, but it's limited by what Adobe and plug-in manufacturers make for it (I checked --- you can't get at Skia's weight and width axes, nor its alternates, nor ligatures beyond the f-ligatures in the AAT version of Zapfino or Hoefler Text), or available man-power/time. Your work doesn't require you to go beyond these limits---mine does. Moreover, I don't see how your opinion on a tool can be valid if you're not capable of using it fully.
Here're a couple of pieces from my portfolio:
http://members.aol.com/willadams/portfolio/typo
http://members.aol.com/willadams/portfolio/typo
http://members.aol.com/willadams/portfolio/typo
http://members.aol.com/willadams/portfolio/typo
http://members.aol.com/willadams/portfolio/typo
What've you got to show off?
William
What about the part where you didn't take into consideration that if I'm using Windows, I have to remember to _not_ do option-shift-hyphen and instead hold down the alt key and strike 0151 on the keypad (unless its a machine I've installed AllChars for Windows in which case it's tap the right control key, m, then -). It's a lot easier to just always use --- and either trust TeX to get it right, or search-replace at the end of the project.
3 8/ 102-9996269-8967304
Funny you should mention calendars --- ever hear of a book called _Calendrical Tabulations_?
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/05217825
I did the moonphase font for it. Care to guess how it was typeset?
Let me know when you think you can typeset something like that in less than a couple of hours (which was how long the TeX run took), 'kay?
Are you not going to try to provide an example of a textual page which can't be done in TeX?
William
minor correction:
`` - is it compatble w/ the equation editor in Claris/AppleWorks? Is it able to grant finer control over equations?''
should've read something like, `` - is it compatble w/ the equation editor in Claris/AppleWorks for legacy documents? (LaTeX2e is nice enough to offer a compatibility mode for 2.09 which goes _way_ back) Is it able to grant finer control over equations? (esp. in terms of aligning related equations which have text in them).
William
A typical, naive user won't be able to tell the difference between how they use LyX and how they use Word. LyX is a graphical front-end to LaTeX which allows access to much of LaTeX's power. Granted Word has capabilitied not present in LyX (revision tracking is a good example).
e s/ TeX%20Sample%20Pages/
a da ms.pdf
Pages is a program I've looked forward to and argued for for a long while --- however, a couple of quick questions on its capabilities:
- is it compatble w/ the equation editor in Claris/AppleWorks? Is it able to grant finer control over equations?
- is there a way for a template designer to specify styles for use in specific areas of a documents without requiring user intervention? (say if one wants proportional old-style figures in text, monospaced old-style figures in tables, and proportional lining figures in running heads)
- is there an easy way to ask that a paragraph run a line longer or shorter _if_ doing so doesn't exceed a certain ``badness''
- how about running an entire chapter long or short?
All of the above is trivial in TeX/LaTeX/ConTeXt.
Hyphens for en / em dashes. I move constantly from Windows to Mac to Unix boxes. Using hyphens (two for en dashes, three for ems) allows me to unambiguously represent them. It's a standard which was also present in PageMaker. It's also slightly faster to tap a key thrice than to do a three-key combination (for me at least).
Unfortunately, InDesign, Illustrator and PhotoShop are the only mainstream apps which fully support OpenType font access, a thing which I've railed about for a long while, but before these apps existed / had these capabilities, I've been using TeX to get contextual ligatures. You may've had the leisure of waiting for these apps, but I've got stuff in my print portfolio dating back to 1989, and I wasn't willing to compromise on not having old-style figures, f-ligatures &c.
Does InDesign support contextual ligatures for AAT fonts? XeTeX lets me access _all_ of Skia's features (and Zapfino's and Hoefler Text's, and for the latter two I don't have to ``upgrade'' to the OpenType versions), including its weight and width axes. I know InDesign 2 doesn't---haven't had a chance to try CS.
If TeX is obsolete, then where is the high-end equation editor for InDesign? How does one do publications like
http://www.atlis.com/services/composition/sampl
or create a system like http://custompub.aimsapp.com
Or consider the simple matter of a child's Rebus story --- is it reasonable to double-click on the glyph palette for _every_ image?
http://www.tug.org/TUGboat/Articles/tb24-2/tb77
Lessee, I've provided links to books, a poster, and various presentations --- got any links to a textual document which can't be done in TeX?
The difference in our attitude is that before I pass judgement on a tool, I learn how to use it, and evaluate _all_ of its limitations. TeX is the first layout tool I've found whose _only_ limitation is (my) human ingenuity. Quark is limited by what people find profitable to create as XTensions, InDesign by what's available as plug-ins, Pages has the advantage of being able to use Services, but even so, you can't do arbitrarily complex things in it w/o an unacceptable amount of effort. You may find that acceptable, but for my work, it's not.
William
Using LyX (which is a graphical front-end for LaTeX) doesn't require any programming / coding at all. It's essentially indistinguishable from Word in usage.
.pdf of multi-file document, InDesign can't typeset equations or manage large documents. That said, InDesign is certainly the best graphical page layout program currently available, and the Pages module in iWork is a worth successor to the NeXT program Pages by Pages, Inc.
I'm interested in being able to do anything I want in a reasonable fashion --- I don't consider things like doing search-replace in an XPress Tags file to insert ligatures from an Expert font reasonable, nor is having to access the glyph palette in InDesign to insert alternates for Zapfino or Hoefler Text reasonable either.
Good enough isn't, and I want a tool without limitations --- Quark can't make a hyper-linked
I'm not saying that TeX should be used for all things, merely that it's the best tool for the sort of things I do for the most part (though I do use some other tools for things in my portfolio, see http://members.aol.com/willadams ), and overall a tool worth considering, and one which can be reasonably adapted to pretty much any project if need be.
By contrast, to return to the topic at hand --- how does one get XML through InDesign to get a typeset page with as little human intervention as possible? Is there any better tool for automation than AppleScript? What if one wants to deploy on a Windows box?
William
On the bright side, TeX does get HZ capabilities in pdftex --- see HTH's doctoral thesis (Adobe very generously provided a grant to aid him in his stufies).
ConTeXt is way cool, and I agree it's one of the best things in the TeX world, and I'm glad of the variety of choice.
William
There's no need to write macros to do basic tasks --- or even code for that matter, look at http://www.lyx.org for an example of a tool which enables this.
XeTeX handles Unicode just as well as Pages does --- uses the same Quartz mechanism and Mac OS X input methods / keyboard layouts.
Pages has an on-line help file, no? And of course, there'll be lots of books like, _iWork Pages: The Missing Manual_ --- but if it's so wonderful at imbuing typographic principles why do a lot of the documents shown in screen grabs have lines which are too long for their typesize (many seem to be more than three alphabets long, which is at least half an alphabet too many).
Taking over the world doesn't matter to me. Being correct does.
TeX is the most-flexible, least-limited typesetting tool available, and far more suited to my own work and working style than XPress or InDesign (both of which I use at work). While XPress and InDesign are both serviceable enough, they're not customizable / programmable enough for all situations, especially those involving long texts or repetition (which is much of what typography is).
William
IME it's more like the boss calls you in, states that you were correct in your complaints about the company they tried to outsource the latest project to, that it's a miserable failure and hopeless unless you can salvage it.
Six weeks of sixty to eighty-hour work-weeks later the project was back on track.
It wouldn't be so bad if I'd not accepted a salaried position...
William
Except that an Adobe employee confirmed my statement that InDesign's H&J is based on TeX's by way of URW's HZ algorithm --- you really don't think Adobe licensed HZ from URW to not use it?
As regards Unicode --- while it's true Omega has gone dormant there're two viable successors:
- Aleph - a direct combination of Omega and e-TeX
- XeTeX - a Mac OS X-specific variant able to use OpenType and AAT fonts
William
What H&J algorithm are you going to be using in XML:FO?
How are you going to control for widows and orphans and getting nice, even, balanced pages?
What about running pages (or chapters!) long or short at need?
How are you going to handle equations? Write them up by hand using MathML? You are aware that MathML is intended solely as an interchange format, and that there's nothing sane about a person attempting to type it up by hand?
William
First off, it's Quark XPress.
Second, it's only recently that Quark has been able to use anything other than a lousy bitmap preview for placed art. The majority of XPress users never upgraded from v4, and so get cruddy bitmaps (unless they license an XTension which then litters their HD w/ preview files) and a weird shift from nice anti-aliased type to blocky bitmaps when editing text at certain sizes).
Thirdly, Quark is incredibly limited in terms of the glyphs which it can access, so What You See Is All You're Going to Get, and you ain't gonna automatically get spiffy ligatures in it from OpenType and AAT fonts (manually inserting ligatures pulled in from ``Expert fonts'' is _so_ 20th century (and something I found tedious immediately after purchasing Adobe Garamond back in 1989) and fixing them by search-replacing in XPress Tags is a poor solution).
And lastly, Quark still has a brain-dead, one-line at at time H&J algorithm --- at least Adobe had the sense to make use of TeX's algorithm when they developed InDesign.
William
Oh well, there go my mods.
r ib/memoir/memman.pdf ).
I submit that if one understands TeX (and LaTeX) and works with them as they are intended to be adjusted, that there's really no limit to what one can do, or what one can make things look like.
In support of this, I offer the TeX Showcase at http://www.tug.org/texshowcase.
(ob. discl. it includes some stuff from my personal portfolio at http://members.aol.com/willadams)
Even bad typography can be mimicked as is shown in a (thankfully unreleased) package to mimic Word's typography.
Another document done with TeX (well, Omega) is at
http://www.tug.org/tug2003/donate/
Duane Bibby did the drawing, I did the layout and typesetting.
Even the age-old complaint of Computer Modern being the only easily-usable font has fallen by the wayside w/ Jonathan Kew's wonderful XeTeX variant for Mac OS X ( available at http://scripts.sil.org/xetex ) and Will Robertson's nifty fontspec package ( http://www.mecheng.adelaide.edu.au/~will/tex/ ).
I challenge you to find a better on-line text on a tool for typography than Peter Wilson's manual for his Memoir documentclass ( http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/cont
If you're not managing to get things done in TeX as you might wish, you've only yourself to blame---for my part, I was very glad to discover TeX and in it a tool with no limitations other than human ingenuity.
William
But the original intent w/ the Web was wiki-like as well---worldwideweb.app on a NeXT Cube allowed one to browse _and_ edit---it was only when Mosaic was released that one had a graphical Web Browser which was crippled to only browse.
Tim Berners-Lee discusses this in his nifty book _Weaving the Web_ (which also has a cameo by Ted Nelson) as well as a brief bit where he notes he was writing early drafts of the book in NaviPress (a browser which was also an editor) which later became AOLpress.
William
(who was really glad when Nvu came along and offered a decent visual editor which can publish to AOL servers since AOL took away the http-put feature which AOLpress used)
My opinion is based on what I read in NeXTWorld and other industry publications, but as the divorce lawyers say, ``There're three sides to every story, his, hers and the truth.'' --- certainly didn't mean to claim that my observations were absolutely authoritative and final, but my understanding based on what I'd read.
I did note ``the implosion of the NeXT market and the shift to custom / vertical apps'' though...
Not sure by what you mean by the ``VC interaction on the board'', but it doesn't sound pleasant.
The skunkworks Windows effort sounds interesting though, and glad to hear that something of it survived in other projects.
William
Pages was done in by:
- being vapourware and _very_ late to market
- never providing a promised interactive/visual design tool
- the implosion of the NeXT market and the shift to custom / vertical apps
- Altsys Virtuoso (developed by the people who'd done FreeHand) getting page layout features
- Glenn Reid writing PasteUp.app in his basement over the course of a summer
All of the above wasn't helped by Ted Shelton's company ITS being shafted on the Enterprise Object Frameworks license over their web-app development software (to give NeXT a leg-up w/ Web Objects).
William
How would one get in touch with you?
and where are you?
William
What happened to brilliant things like the Apple ][ program Rocky's Boots?
Apparently Leapster development is done w/ Flash 5?
William
(whose daughter has a Pixter and really wishes there was a way to get her drawings out of it and copied to a computer)
It seems to me a lot more straight-forward for this family to merely contact all friends of the deceased and ask that they forward any e-mails to / from said person which they wish to share.
William
I'm using OpenStep on the Sparcstation 'cause that was what I last installed and I'd thought it'd be easier to set up (and management shot down my idea of getting an Xserver or even a second PowerMac G5 w/ Mac OS X Server).... then I actually started looking into it and trying to get connections &c. setup, and it's just not working thus far.
Will using Linux or FreeBSD be reasonably easy to set up?
William
excluding of course Mac OS X Server?
I've been looking into setting up a Sparcstation running OpenStep 4.2 here at work as a Netinfo Server, but keep coming across reports of people not being able to connect which is a bit off-putting.
I'd be willing to use FreeBSD or Linux though if it could be set up easily (and inexpensively!) enough.
William
I dunno. I think leaving out the Barrow Wights (and Tom Bombadil to extricate them from it) removes a lot of meaning from Eowyn and Merriman's encounter with the Lord of the Ringwraiths. ``Glad indeed would he who wrought that blade been to have known its ultimate fate for chief among the enemies of his folk were the Witch King of Angmar.'' or something like that. Also a shame since it cuts Pippin's heroics down quite a bit.
Agree reusing Arwen isn't so bad --- though still kind of a shame since it gives short shrift to Glorfindel, an elf who returned from the Halls of Mandos to continue his struggle against Sauron in Middle Earth.
William
Probably the LaTeX access would be more along the lines of how one can get to LaTeX from OmniOutliner by exporting to an XML schema for which there is a converter to LaTeX.
William