Re: Revise group description?

Hey Michael! Welcome to the fray… :)

S1000D was not included in my tirade since my last experience with that particular standard left me believing that anyone who has made a commitment to implement S1000D is going to have at least one or two people like Michael Hahn around. So yes, aerospace tech docs are definitely an area where XSL-FO can be and is used… I think this was even true of Arbortext’s S1000D implementation when I last looked (although I think there were active plans to migrate and meld at least part of the S1000D suite of tools that were bought to go with the Service Information Solution they were brewing back in 2009).

I glossed over S1000D and related predecessors because I was thinking that this particular group probably had a pretty good handle on that particular bit of history.

And yeah… Since I cut my teeth typesetting scholarly journals and textbooks, I definitely have a couple of non-military infrastructure facets to my publishing perspective. I’ve spent my time with change page FOSIs, too, though, so I’m not completely devoid of the “just spit it out onto paper” world of typographic design. It’s just not my schtick, either.

And Arved – I know very well what you meant by a report… But in my world, there’s a very large difference between a report that is made up of regular data (something you MIGHT get from an Excel spreadsheet – no guarantees) and the amorphous stuff text stuff that is not so regular (although 20 years of telling people to markup stuff up hierarchically and consistently has definitely made some in roads here). The fact remains that while all text may be data, not all data is text… I specialize in the irregular stuff where people want to do fancy and expensive layouts (or heck, just distribute one EPUB across multiple vendors).

We could keep this conversation up for a very long time, but I think that we eventually did accomplish what Tony was looking for – we now have a very long list of publishing and page layout technologies that some, if not all members of the group are interested in working with. We’ve also realized that it will be a very quiet group going forward if the main focus of conversation is XSL-FO. In my mind… That leaves us with the “OK… What next?” question to answer.

Do we want to grow the group? Because I know quite a few people in the Digital Publishing Interest Group who would be happy to join the conversation over here – even if the whole Digital Publishing thing is, well, not exactly about page layout engines…

Do we want to share any of our observations with W3C working groups that are still open for business (like the CSS gang)?

Do we want to start a list of actionable items?

I’ll leave these out there for Sunday contemplation. I may go silent for a few days myself. The day job calls and I have just figured out that I need to put together slides for 3 presentations between January 8 and February 12… (Yes I finally remembered what I was supposed to be doing earlier, and what was I thinking!?!)

-J


From: Michael Hahn <xmlronin@gmail.com<mailto:xmlronin@gmail.com>>
Organization: Alphabetical by Author
Reply-To: "michael@alphabyauthor.com<mailto:michael@alphabyauthor.com>" <michael@alphabyauthor.com<mailto:michael@alphabyauthor.com>>
Date: Saturday, December 28, 2013 at 6:58 PM
To: "public-ppl@w3.org<mailto:public-ppl@w3.org>" <public-ppl@w3.org<mailto:public-ppl@w3.org>>
Cc: "michael@alphabyauthor.com<mailto:michael@alphabyauthor.com>" <michael@alphabyauthor.com<mailto:michael@alphabyauthor.com>>
Subject: Re: Revise group description?
Resent-From: <public-ppl@w3.org<mailto:public-ppl@w3.org>>
Resent-Date: Saturday, December 28, 2013 at 6:59 PM

If I may de-lurk for a moment...

Jean, Tony, and Arved all have valid points and none of my
counter-arguments have any significant substance - I'm not a big fan of
DITA and the Open Toolkit, f'rinstance - but I just wanted to add a
little seasoning to the stew.

My last four jobs/consulting projects have more-or-less had the same set
of requirements:

1) Use a standard schema (DITA or S1000D),
2) Produce PDF and electronic publications from the same source, and
3) Make the processing as simple to maintain and cost-effective as possible.

It's definitely possible to produce a set of stylesheets targeted to
XSL-FO that satisfies those requirements and that, past the initial
investment, doesn't require an expert to maintain and modify as needed.
  For my previous employer I was producing 30,000 pages a month with
less than $2000 worth of software.

In my segment of the technical documentation arena, simplicity and
accuracy are more valuable than esthetics - the book designers among you
should review Chapter 6 of the S1000D specification if you want to test
your ability to suppress your gag reflex.  I'm continually reminded of
the line I heard many years ago: "The US military has invested an
enormous amount of money in creating a complex and sophisticated
publishing system that produces manuals that look like they came off a
1950s mimeograph machine."  The average aircraft maintenance manual
isn't much better.

The latest round of stylesheets I'm developing is minimizing the number
of application extensions involved so the same data and stylesheets can
produce equivalent PDF output regardless of the FO processor used*.
Since we're in the development phase, what's more important at this
juncture is a) accessibility for someone other than the stylesheet
writer, b) fitness to task (designing for versions of the data spec not
in use is a silly waste of time), and c) consistent, accurate, and clear
output.

Your mileage very likely varies - but those are the requirements I've
been given, so a generalized solution like XSL-FO is very useful.

*Okay, so an expert can tell the difference, but my customers are
experts in aircraft maintenance, not layout design.

--
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Michael R. Hahn
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michael@alphabyauthor.com<mailto:michael@alphabyauthor.com>
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