Re: [Fcp-general] Hello...

[Aaron Traas]

Peter Hutnick wrote:
> Did you take us off-list intentionally?  If not, try to remember to
> "reply all".  I'm not bringing us back on-list because I'm quoting
> you.  Feel free to reply to this message on-list.

It was a mistake. I forgot to hit "reply-to-all". Been a while since 
I've been on a mailing list.

> You are more than welcome to take a stab at the Algebra text.
>
> On the other hand I would, on a personal level, be particularly
> delighted with some home-ec stuff.  I think we need breadth more than
> depth at this point.

That's where I'm frankly more interested, at this point. And I agree 
about the breadth vs. depth argument. If someone sees that something is 
started, they'll probably be more likely to add.

> > The biggest problem with me doing history, higher math, and english is
> > that I've been out of school for so long. I know the stuff, but don't
> > remember the names and dates and technical terms, and step-by-step
> > processes.
>
> I understand.  If you /want/ to do these things there is no reason I
> can see that you shouldn't use references.  I'm not an IP lawyer, but
> my understanding is that facts can't be copyrighted.

Fair enough... but I think I'll work on the cooking stuff first.

> As far as I can tell, ODT (which I hadn't heard of until I got your
> message this morning) isn't supported by any production software yet. 
> I don't think it even existed when that decision was made.
>
> In any case, I picked LaTeX because it is plain text open format, it
> produces high quality output, is freely available, and is
> multi-platform.
>
> I don't anticipate many submissions in LaTeX.  I'm okay with that.
>
> I use OO.o regularly for other purposes, but I have some concerns with
> using it in this context.  The primary one is that, while it is
> conceptually XML (i.e. plain text) based, the acutal output files are
> binary, which makes (external) version control practically impossible.
>  Using the internal version control will bloat the files, and create
> an undesirable editor dependence.

Yeah... revision control of binary content is a major pain in the butt. 
Theoretically, a version control program could probably make a special 
case for formats like ODT, and transparently decompress, untar, and 
check in the XML files (ODT is, in fact, a tarball). But I doubt 
anything supports that right now. Would be damn cool, though.