Re: What layout/styling technologies have people used?

On Wed, December 18, 2013 1:06 am, Jean Kaplansky wrote:
> That’s quite a list you’ve got going there. TeX is still very much in use
> in the scholarly publishing world.

Used under-the-hood in Patrick's project/product, too.

> Framemaker is very much in use for anyone who does DITA.
>
> The DITA Open Toolkit still relies on FOP unless someone plugs in
> AntennaHouse or RenderX…

Hard to ship an open toolkit otherwise.

> EPUB 3 = HTML5 + CSS3 by definition, including an addendum to support
> fixed layout

Sebastian Rahtz was showing a scholarly work (on an iPad) two years ago
where one page of each spread was a scan of the original authors notebook
and the opposite page was an already deciphered typewritten version of the
same text.

> I wrote some fairly complex FOSIs for Arbortext’s original TeX based
> publishing engine from 1995 – 2000 and beyond. The default publishing
> engine was replaced with the Arbortext Professional Publishing engine (AKA
> 3B2) a couple of years ago. FOSIs were essentially replaced by Styler

3B2, when they were still 3B2, did the conference proceedings for the
SGML/XML conference one year (1999?), but they did the styling and we just
did the proofing, so I can't count that.

I produced the gets of the conference exhibitors' guide once or twice
using FileMakerPro, but no markup involved, so not counting that.

> proprietary stylesheets. Kind of a bummer. You really could do some pretty
> cool things with a FOSI if you were in the know, tenacious, and had access
> to the engineers on the 4th floor… The APP engine is capable of far more
> sophisticated layouts, though. Unfortunately, it has taken a long time to
> put an interface on top of the engine to make it usable by mere mortals
> (compared to programming gurus).
>
> The big two missing from your list are Quark and InDesign. Quark was the
> next big thing just as I was leaving the comp house where I did page
> layout with a pica stick and a calculator in 1995. InDesign seemingly took

That's when I became an SGML consultant.

> over the professional/trade/educational publishing world around 2006-2007.

When I was moving from software engineer back to self-employed consultant.

> Indesign server is a very popular option for SaaS providers.
>
> BTW – in trade/professional/educational publishing most PDFs are
> considered “print ready” and prepared with profiles to go to printers.

Yes, but there's also lots of consumer electronic products that ship with
a CD-ROM containing PDF manuals that no-one's ever going to print (or
read!), so it's hard to say what proportion of PDF files that are produced
are ever printed.  But looking good on screen is as important as looking
good on paper.

Regards,


Tony.

Received on Wednesday, 18 December 2013 22:24:00 UTC