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Subject:Decoupling editing and printing From:Sandy Harris <sharris -at- DKL -dot- COM> Date:Fri, 20 Aug 1999 13:57:15 -0400
Tossing out some likely fairly controversial notions in hopes of
starting an interesting discussion:
I'm wondering about the distinction between things an author should
control and things the display or printing program, using a style
sheet for its user's preferences, should control.
When I'm writing, I often don't know how the text should be displayed.
On one job, we had some large Frame docs, maybe 10 of them at a few 100
pages each, and some writers had used a lot of hard page breaks to fit
things on our corporate standard pages. Then the product was sold to
a customer who wanted all our manuals printed on their corporate
standard size. There was a lot of busywork that needed doing before
they got what they needed.
Methinks the computer should do the busywork. An operation like that
should require changing style sheets, perhaps creating the new one,
and printing. Period. If it needs manual intervention or custom
scripts, something is broken.
Overstating slightly for the sake of argument:
If your print formatting program cannot format a document properly
on various page sizes without hard page breaks, it is broken.
If your editor allows writers to insert hard page breaks, that is
a bug.
The same applies to things like font size. You cannot, in general, know
something should be 12 point. A visually impaired reader may want it in
18, and should be able to get that (with sensible page breaks etc.)
just by using a different style sheet.
If I quote a piece of your text, there are things I can change without
risking you claiming you've been misquoted: line breaks, page breaks,
font, ... Other things, like wording, punctuation and emphasis, I cannot
change.
I think that is exactly where the WYSIWYG line should be drawn. Anything
you cannot change when quoting me, I should control when I write the
document.
Things you could change when quoting, you should be able to change when
reading. These should be entirely controlled by the display or print
formatter, driven by a style sheet and structural (rather than format)
tags.
So I should /not/ be able to ask for 18 point when writing, but must
be able to label some text as a level one header when writing, and to
specify that (for a particular display or perintout) level one headers
get 18 point.
