John McGhie said:
Hi Elliott:
{Giggle} It's just after midday in the UK, so Elliot will still be too hung
over to be here, so I can say what I like about him
)
One of these days I'm gonna sneak across the International Date Line
and smack ya with a clue by four while you are looking the other way...
They already did that. You want a copy?
Seriously. Yes please. Please send a few excess braincells in the ready
to transplant container with it. It is the holy grail - magic bullet -
insert mixed metaphor here - of all document processing, if not
programming too. XML is a bit of a mess, but its heart is in the right
place. I do hope that everyone will eventually open up all their DTDs
and DOMs and XSLTs and all the other TLAs so the meta can live with the
data.
Buy a PC if that's important to you
I hope you are not serious. If they are gonna call it "Office". Excel
and Word had better be properly integrated, even on the Mac side. They
have to re-do the ActiveX stuff anyway, even over there.
Kindly remember that the "X" in XML stands for "eXtensible". The "syntax"
is an ISO standard. The structures must be defined by the Document Type
Definition, just as they are with HTML and SGML.
In XML, it is more usual to use an XML Style Sheet, which incorporates both
the DTD and the Formatting Output Specification Instance.
For Word, there is a WordML DTD published by Microsoft, which many people
use for run-of-the-mill documents, because it's much easier than hiring a
specialist XML Programmer to create a DTD for you
Strongly agree. That is a great basis for interworking between sets of
users and sets of developers. I'd like to see interworking between Word
and InDesign and similar programs. You are starting to convince me that
Word has no business doing page and book layout, but the logical
consequence of that is there should be a terrific strong interworking
between it and programs that do.
Consider the bits that Word does badly, like preserving pagination,
copy fitting, illustration placement, typography, that InDesign does so
well. It would be lovely to see those two sitting together like emacs
and LaTeX, but of course each requiring far less of the user's time to
learn. As it stands, InDesign does a pretty good job with well chosen
Word styles, but it is a one-way street. Once placed, Word is out of
it. I'd love to see a document assembly thing with source and version
control that combined those two.
Given that I am constantly nagging for XML support in Office Mac, I am
"hoping" we get it next time.
Master Documents are indeed fixed in XML. Visual SourceSafe ships with
Office 2003 Enterprise and provides full transparent source control and
version management -- would anyone on the Mac want it?
Yep. Mac use does not imply airhead bimbo. VSS used to come with
CodeWarrior. It would not take all that much work. It is one of the
things I would like to see in both Tiger and Longhorn. Now that people
are finally waking up to security and accountability in their toy
computers, maybe with enough of us asking for it, and waving our credit
cards and purchase orders about, we will finally get something that
works. Version control - labelled asset management - is flavour of the
month with the pony-tail set in Macland. I know Tiger is getting ACLs
(Access Control Lists) and that NT has had them ever since day 1.
Version Control right in the OS is something we should expect.
SharePoint II provides sufficient source control and check-in, check-out for
most requirements. We would need some "enhancements" to Office Mac to
support it. But this is likely to be a lot more attainable than porting VSS
to the Mac
That's coming, I am almost sure of it. They are currently putting a lot of
work into the "Task Pane" in Office PC. We know it as the Formatting
Palette. One of the things we have been asking for is an interface to allow
us to completely customise the thing. In Office 2003, the stub is there:
you can customise things on and off the task pane. In Office 2004, the
whole concept was improved and refined in Word 2004. The Word 2004 task
pane can be customised, and the customisations will stick. Unfortunately,
we can't yet develop our own widgets and stick them on the Formatting
palette, but I think we're very nearly to where you want to be. yep
If the clowns had simply kept up with its development, FrameMaker would be
the killer app in the technical writing space. They had SGML. All they had
to do was add VBA to it and it would have gobbled Word's high-end market in
a flash. If Corel can add VBA to its products, I don't know why Adobe
thinks it can't add it to FrameMaker. Other than the fact that it would
have to pay for the licence... Heh!
Well, dot-Net is a much more open product, so Adobe has absolutely no excuse
for not adding C# and VB.Net to their products
I hope that .NET stuff done right will eventually reach OS X. I have
been watching Mono with interest. If Java makes sense, so does .NET
If they want floating layered graphics, use a publishing program that does
it properly: the document you are making probably "won't" contain 2,500
pages: it does not need Word's bulk text processing engine: it just needs
floating frames
One of the reasons it is such a mess is that it is hard to get the mix
right. Word should do better at placing text. A very large fraction of
the cries for help on this list relate to pagination problems. However,
as soon as you start placing graphics, the text placement problem gets
so difficult that your 'separate publishing program' argument becomes
almost reasonable.
At the same time, Word is still awful at including external graphics.
It is really difficult to persuade it to do the right thing with eps.
It makes a hash of PDF. It behaves like a spoilt child when re-sizing
bitmaps. If it gets any of that wrong, the mess flows into the
pagination and that buggers the table of contents. For that, and the
lists of figures and tables, the publishing program and the Word
processor need to be talking to one another. It is not easy to draw
your line.
Regrettably, I don't hear many people clamouring for Dot-Net on the Mac.
<snip>
OK. Here comes a small clamour. (Not too loud though. The New Year's
day hangover and all)
Cheers
