[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Freeshadow

Dennis, well since Elfwreck spoke of 20-30 years I answered keeping this in mind.
I never meant to state the same true for sources from the Linotype era, when typesetting meant feeding a machine with lead and the only backups were hardcopy or microfiche.

I didn't think you did, but it's still a factor.

And forget about the publisher for a moment: does the author have an electronic file? I just answered a question elsewhere from an author who has electronic files she can't read: they were created in MS Word 2.0. Word 2003 won't open them.

This was actually MS trying to do folks a favor by blocking potentially harmful content that might have been included in older Word documents, and they subsequently admitted they over-reacted and post instructions online on re-enabling Word 2003 to open the files, but that didn't help her at the time.

the guy who assured me RTF is still (i.e. I'm aware of the status slowly passing) regarded pretty universal is working as a typesetter himself. his argument was, it's known as export or conversion format by pretty every text editor, and imported both by by quarkxpress which was for years the leading piece of soft in this field, as well as by the adobes. he also pointed out docfiles are everyones creep, due to inter version and platform differences.

He's quite right about the advantages. RTF files are pretty universal, in that a number of things can read and write them. The problem is that they aren't universally used. As mentioned, publishers all expect Word files.

And even if everyone used RTF, that gives you a readable backup for the manuscript. It does not give you a useful backup for the marked up, typeset version that will be used as the source file for the actual book, paper or electronic. You don't want to recreate that from scratch.

your example portraying the lifecycle of 70+ years on from creation up to now is far beyond what i answered to. but apart from that my kudos to said company for what they do.

Oh, mine as well. I was aware of John Deere as a quality brand, but I wasn't aware of their commitment to service and support of really old gear.

But the key is that with XML, you take the pain up front to get your material into good XML, and your life becomes easier down the road.

The specific case I asked her about was brought up by a discussion elsewhere, and regarded textbooks. To do textbooks electronically, you pretty much have to use PDF files. They tend to have things like multi-column layout, sidebars, footnotes, and illustrations that are not well supported (or supported at all) by current dedicated ebook readers. The Kindle DX is intended to address that case, with a larger screen and PDF support, but initial reports from students using them in pilot university projects has been underwhelming.

The chap I was talking to thinks textbooks have to be reimplemented to take advantage of the capabilities of things like the iPad. I see the point, but the problem is cost. Creating two separate output formats like that - PDF for printed book and whatever for iPad - will be expensive, and textbooks already cost a lot to produce by the nature of the material. I was wondering how much XML and XSLT could assist, so they you could keep your source material in XML and use XSLT style sheets to handle much of the dirty work of maintaining two separate output formats. She guessed XML/XSLT could handle about 85% of it, which makes the idea a lot more reasonable. But you still have to have the stuff in XML in the first place.

In case of the really old stuff I'm softening my point to "if the still have copyright for that the might have taken care about media transition of backups at least in 15y cycles, what would lead to having digitized tapes with a file format still readable now.

I agree with your desire. I just felt the execution was a bit more complicated than you made it sound.
______
Dennis