Quote:
Originally Posted by Freeshadow
a) over dramatised. It would be rather a box of 2GB tapes (you still get drives for that) if they would have been thinking at least a bit about serious backups.
b) if they d have kept the original MSfile it would most likely an .rtf
i've been told they are a long time already regarded as a lingua franca file format in publishing since they can be imported by kind of every DTP soft be it on PC mac or whatever.
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Not over dramatized at all.
I just had a conversation with a friend about such issues. She's a XML specialist. One of her clients a few years ago was agricultural equipment manufacturer John Deere. John Deere makes tractors. It's a point of pride that they build them sturdy, and that a properly maintained John Deere tractor will last for decades. And they commit to having parts, manuals, and service for them. There are still John Deere tractors made in the 1930's in use that John Deere commits to service and support.
Think about the issues involved in keeping service manuals available for vehicles made in the 1930s, when there
weren't electronic files of any kind, let alone stuff published more recently.
Deere's solution (and the solution I think publishing will be dragged kicking and screaming to), was to spend the time and effort to get everything into well formed XML. This meant scan, OCR, and proofread stuff only available in hardcopy, as well as transformations on stuff that had some form of electronic copy. Once it's all in XML, you can use XSLT to do transformations and get the data into a different format for end use.
And whoever told you RTF files are lingua franca is behind the times. Yes, RTF files have the advantage of portability. It is, after all, a text based format, and if you have to, you can diddle the underlying formatting commands in a text editor. And many things out there understand RTF.
But what publishing does nowadays is get Word documents, work on those till an approved final version is created, then import that into InDesign for typesetting and markup. The output from InDesign is normally a PDF file that goes the the printer. The printer feeds the PDF to an imagesetter that creates the plates from which the book will be printed.
Which of those three formats do you think the publisher should archive?
If you archive the Word document, you retain the text but sacrifice the formatting. If you retain the InDesign file, you keep the formatting but risk obsolescence if the underlying InDesign format gets changes in newer versions, or if something else replaces InDesign. If you keep the PDF, you introduce problems in trying to modify the existing document. (And if you try to keep all three, I guarantee they will get separated somewhere along the way, and the one that went missing is the one you need to get.)
XML has the advantage of being a standard, so you can assume there will be more than one toolset that can create, edit and transform it and you won't be locked into one vendor of the tools, and it's an intermediate format that can be used to generate the desired output formats.
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Dennis