RE: [Groff] Groff editor.

[Meg McRoberts]

My current job requires writing long, highly-technical documents in
Word and it is absolutely HORRID!  I totally agree with you!

I've seen editors for HTML and XML where you have two windows, one
that contains the raw source and one that contains a reasonably-accurate
rendition of the formatted text.  You can edit in either pane and the
results are displayed to the other.  This seems like a reasonable
compromise between people who prefer the raw text format (like most
of us on this list) and those who prefer the WYSIWYG approach.

--- Nick Stoughton <address@hidden> wrote:

> On Mon, 2007-08-20 at 14:11 -0400, Karee, Srinivas wrote:
> > Basically I cannot lose bold/italic/font and other stuff.
> 
> The issue here for me is about the "meta-information". I have a 4,000
> page document that describes programming APIs. The fact that a function
> name is in italics with () after it is of much less importance to me
> than the fact that I'm talking about a function here, which is something
> that will appear in the index, etc etc. And when I describe a symbolic
> constant, it comes out in ALL CAPS and in Courier-Roman font, but as far
> as I'm concerned, I'm just describing a constant. I don't care what it
> looks like until the very last moment when it gets rendered for the
> reader.
> 
> This is one of the things I hate about WYSIWYG editors ... it is all
> about the rendering, and not about the content.
> 
> Both groff and docbook-XML give me this level of abstraction when I'm
> dealing with the source of a document. Word does not. 
> 
> So, my real question, I guess, is do you care only about the
> bold/italic/font information, or do you care about the meaning (and
> possible other side effects, such as indexing)  behind the font?
> -- 
> Nick Stoughton <address@hidden>
> USENIX
> 
>