Quote:
Originally Posted by bowerbird
steve said:
> And I don't think ePub serves to "raise the bar" on the small publishers,
> because it's a format that anyone can create, without fancy software
> or hacks, and any reader can be trained to use (because it's XHTML).
you think xhtml can be created by "anyone"?
writers don't want to code xhtml. they want to write. and re-write.
and then re-write some more. but they don't want to code xhtml...
i mean, the publishing companies will try to force them to do coding
if they want to self-publish. because then writers won't self-publish.
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I have an assortment of technical documents in Postscript format. Do you think the authors wrote Postscript code to do the formatting?
Nope. They used an editor or word processor that output Postscript, but they did the markup using the WYSIWYG editing features provided by their editor.
Consider Microsoft Word. It defaults to a Word document, but can produce several flavors of that (for backwards compatibility with older versions), Rich Text Format, HTML (though poor HTML...), and a couple of variants of plain text. There are add-ons that will let you output to PDF.
But output format is a choice when saving. The author uses the same editing program in the same way regardless.
Along the same lines, one of the tools installed here is LyX, a WYSIWYG text editor that generates TeX code for typesetting. The author needn't be concerned about the details of TeX. A TeX engine runs in the background and handles that. The author simply uses standard means to indicate how the printed output should look, and the program handles the rest.
As XHTML becomes more popular, we'll see more writer's tools to generate it. I fail to see a problem.
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Dennis