SIMILE PI call today, 1300 EDT

Hi all, I hope you can make it for today's SIMILE PI meeting.  Sorry for the late notice, I had some trouble setting up the call.

Date of Meeting: APR 25, 2003 
Time of Meeting: 1300 EDT
Meeting ID: 7624 
Meeting Telephone Number:  650-690-9367 (telnet 348-9367)

Proposed agenda:

- Discuss proposed document authoring methodology.

After some experimentation, Mick, Mark and Rob propose LaTeX as the standard tool for preparing SIMILE documents.  If desired, WYSIWYG tools such as LyX can be used to edit the documents, but the LaTeX source is the basis.  Advantages of this approach:

* BibTeX can be used to maintain shared, easily-cited SIMILE bibliography
* Complex layout (e.g. to comply with publisher) much easier than Word
* PDF and HTML can be generated from source
* LaTeX documents are well structed so the metadata can be easily extracted
* LaTeX document source is plain ASCII so doing automated 'diffs' etc. is relatively easy

Disadvantages:

* Can be difficult to set up, especially on Windows-based systems
* Even in LyX processes such as spelling and grammar checking are trickier

We also propose the use of ipssources (www.ipssources.com) for CVS repository for documents and code.  Its issue tracking (BugZilla) is rather overly complex so Mark proposes we continue using the XML/XSLT technique we're currently using.


- Review progress on SIMILE project issues and action list:

http://web.mit.edu/simile/www/resources/pi.html


Speak to you soon, once again sorry for the short notice.

 Robert Tansley / Hewlett-Packard Laboratories / (+1) 617 551 7624

Received on Friday, 25 April 2003 09:44:03 UTC