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From: lsr@Apple.COM (Larry Rosenstein)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: PageMaker and rules of typography
Message-ID: <4307@internal.Apple.COM>
Date: 22 Sep 89 18:00:26 GMT
Sender: usenet@Apple.COM
Organization: Objects-R-Us,  Apple Computer, Inc.
Lines: 32
References:<8909152200.AA03827@cunixd.cc.columbia.edu> <1989Sep19.044538.10360@paris.ics.uci.edu>

In article <1989Sep19.044538.10360@paris.ics.uci.edu> truesdel@ics.uci.edu 
(Scott Truesdell) writes:
> I have managed to turn it into a personal flame, but what the Mac needs
> is a program as powerful and intelligent as LaTeX, with the ease of use
> of a Mac WYSIWYG word processor. A DESIGNER knows when something should
> be in bold face or italic. A writer only knows that it's the title of a
> publication or a subheading for a chapter.

Definitely true.  You might check out products from SoftQuad.  They 
produce publishing systems based on SGML, which is a standard document 
markup language.  You you mark up a document by specifying the headings, 
quotations, lists, etc.  The SGML processor uses a database of tag 
definitions to produce the final document.  (All this runs on UNIX 
machines.)

SoftQuad also wrote a Mac program called Author/Editor which provides a 
convenient way for authors to markup a document.  You can graphically see 
the tags, for example.  It also enforces some of the rules (eg, a 
paragraph object must be contained in a chapter object).

The program doesn't try to be WYSIWYG, since SGML is too complicated for 
that.  Instead it serves as a nice authoring station.  The intelligent 
formatting is left to someone who specializes in that.

I think the October issue of MacWorld has a very short article on SGML (in 
the section that reports little news items).

Larry Rosenstein, Apple Computer, Inc.
Object Specialist

Internet: lsr@Apple.com   UUCP: {nsc, sun}!apple!lsr
AppleLink: Rosenstein1