Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!rochester!cornell!uw-beaver!tektronix!orca!demiurge!brucec
From: brucec@demiurge.WV.TEK.COM (Bruce Cohen;685-2439;61-028)
Newsgroups: comp.text
Subject: Re: Want info on SGML
Keywords: SGML, document processing, markup
Message-ID: <3882@orca.WV.TEK.COM>
Date: 13 Jul 89 01:03:17 GMT
References: <8210005@hp-lsd.HP.COM> <3790@orca.WV.TEK.COM> <1141@io.UUCP> <375@cbnewsi.ATT.COM>
Sender: nobody@orca.WV.TEK.COM
Reply-To: brucec@demiurge.WV.TEK.COM (Bruce Cohen)
Organization: Tektronix, Inc., Wilsonville, OR
Lines: 32

In article <375@cbnewsi.ATT.COM> hrs1@cbnewsi.ATT.COM (herman.r.silbiger) writes:
>In article <1141@io.UUCP>, edb@io.UUCP (Ed Blachman x4420) writes:
>>  And there's currently an ISO committee working on something
>>  called the SPDL -- Standard Page Description Language -- which will be
>>  an application of SGML to page markup.  (Don't ask me why the world
>>  needs another page markup language --
>
>There currently is no STANDARD page description language.  Postscript(TM) is
>widely used, but it is not a standard, and it is controlled by Adobe Systems.
>Interpress(TM) by Xerox is another PDL.

That's not the only justification (pun intended) for SGML.  Postscript and
Interpress are PAGE description languages, not structured markup languages.
They don't really support recording and analyzing the structure of text,
only the visual representation.  Well, maybe that's a bit strong: you could
encode the structure with Postscript, but it's not easy to do unless you
like programming RPN, and there isn't a standard desription syntax for
the textual structure.

As for troff, gag with me a recursive function returning a structure
pointer!  Unless very carefully used by someone willing to write troff
macros, using troff results in losing information about structure.  I
recently tried to develop a way to automatically extract the text structure
from the troff version of our online man pages and gave up in disgust.
Luckily, Framemaker output (MIF) turns out to be acceptable for my
application, and the source for the printed manuals is kept in that form,
so I had an alternative.

Bruce Cohen
brucec@orca.wv.tek.com
Interactive Technologies Division, Tektronix, Inc.
M/S 61-028, P.O. Box 1000, Wilsonville, OR  97070