Quote:
Originally Posted by aapezzuto
So as we are building the project outline and specification, and coming up with use cases, what would the community like to see in such a tool?
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Very simple: Support for every functionality the corresponding *reading* tool provides, and particularly for the optimal use of such functions that are difficult to handle 'manually'.
For instance: If the reader supports discretionary hyphens -- that is, allows the text formatter to suggest good places to do end-of-line hyphenation -- I would like to be able to select a hyphenation dictionary that I (as a book producer) trust and prefer, and to hyphenate all words in the text according to that dictionary, as well as disable or modify some of those hyphenation.
If hyphenation by algorithm, I should be allowed to plug in my own algorithm or configuration data: and thus, I will need support for creating them in the first place.
U.S. hyphenations are an abomination in Br.Eng. text ... and very probably vice versa.
I would suggest that WYSIWYG is out -- it doesn't clearly do anything useful except give a false sense of confidence in the user that he actually is able to control something. Far better, I think, to force the user/book formatter to realize that he/she doesn't have a clue about what the reader will do, unless proofreading is done on the actual devices with the actual readers.