[TUHS] Proliferation of book print styles

[TUHS] Proliferation of book print styles

[Will Senn]

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Today, as I was digging more into nroff/troff and such, and bemoaning 
the lack of brevity of modern text. I got to thinking about the old days 
and what might have gone wrong with book production that got us where we 
are today.

First, I wanna ask, tongue in cheek, sort of... As the inventors and 
early pioneers in the area of moving from typesetters to print on 
demand... do you feel a bit like the Manhattan project - did you maybe 
put too much power into the hands of folks who probably shouldn't have 
that power?

But seriously, I know the period of time where we went from hot metal 
typesetting to the digital era was an eyeblink in history but do y'all 
recall how it went down? Were you surprised when folks settled on word 
processors in favor of markup? Do you think we've progressed in the area 
of ease of creating documentation and printing it making it viewable and 
accurate since 1980?

I didn't specifically mention unix, but unix history is forever bound to 
the evolution of documents and printing, so I figure it's fair game for 
TUHS and isn't yet COFF :).

Later,

Will

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[TUHS] Re: Proliferation of book print styles

[Peter Yardley]

Hi,

My early days were spent in the electronics industry. I can remember receiving 3 pallets of data books from National Semiconductor. This happened every year. The Internet and the availability of on line documentation put a stop to that. It was a revolution.

> On 2 Jun 2024, at 12:31 PM, Will Senn <will.senn@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Today, as I was digging more into nroff/troff and such, and bemoaning the lack of brevity of modern text. I got to thinking about the old days and what might have gone wrong with book production that got us where we are today.
> 
> First, I wanna ask, tongue in cheek, sort of... As the inventors and early pioneers in the area of moving from typesetters to print on demand... do you feel a bit like the Manhattan project - did you maybe put too much power into the hands of folks who probably shouldn't have that power?
> 
> But seriously, I know the period of time where we went from hot metal typesetting to the digital era was an eyeblink in history but do y'all recall how it went down? Were you surprised when folks settled on word processors in favor of markup? Do you think we've progressed in the area of ease of creating documentation and printing it making it viewable and accurate since 1980?
> 
> I didn't specifically mention unix, but unix history is forever bound to the evolution of documents and printing, so I figure it's fair game for TUHS and isn't yet COFF :).
> 
> Later,
> 
> Will

Peter Yardley
peter.martin.yardley@gmail.com

[TUHS] Re: Proliferation of book print styles

[James Frew]

In 1988 I checked a Sun-3 workstation as baggage on a flight from LA to 
Beijing (long story...) The airline shrink-wrapped the whole shmodz onto 
a pallet for customs reasons, but I remember the second-heaviest (i.e. 
expensive) component, after the monitor, was the box of printed manuals...

Online is wonderful.

Cheers,
/Frew

On 2024-06-01 19:44, Peter Yardley wrote:
> I can remember receiving 3 pallets of data books from National Semiconductor. This happened every year. The Internet and the availability of on line documentation put a stop to that. It was a revolution.

[TUHS] Re: Proliferation of book print styles

[Dave Horsfall]

On Mon, 3 Jun 2024, James Frew wrote:

> In 1988 I checked a Sun-3 workstation as baggage on a flight from LA to 
> Beijing (long story...) The airline shrink-wrapped the whole shmodz onto 
> a pallet for customs reasons, but I remember the second-heaviest (i.e. 
> expensive) component, after the monitor, was the box of printed 
> manuals...

When working for Lionel Singer's Sun Australia (a Sun reseller), we had an 
entire room devoted to SunOS manuals; I wonder what happened to them (the 
manuals, I mean)?

-- Dave

[TUHS] Re: Proliferation of book print styles

[Dave Horsfall]

On Tue, 4 Jun 2024, Dave Horsfall wrote:

> When working for Lionel Singer's Sun Australia (a Sun reseller), we had 
> an entire room devoted to SunOS manuals; I wonder what happened to them 
> (the manuals, I mean)?

Sun *Computer* Australia, of course; sigh...

-- Dave

[TUHS] Re: Proliferation of book print styles

[Peter Yardley]

I can remember using Interleaf and Mentor Graphics “Doc”. Semi wysiwyg systems, both a pleasure to use once you got used to them.

Interleaf was quite advanced and was used by a few publishing houses. Chapters were in separate files (helped at the time) brought together by an index file.

Doc was used by Boeing and was designed to produce military grade SGML. It had multiple revision streams, potentially by different authors, which could be coloured to highlight changes.

I wan’t trying to do any mathematics tho.

> On 5 Jun 2024, at 8:54 AM, Dave Horsfall <dave@horsfall.org> wrote:
> 
> On Tue, 4 Jun 2024, Dave Horsfall wrote:
> 
>> When working for Lionel Singer's Sun Australia (a Sun reseller), we had 
>> an entire room devoted to SunOS manuals; I wonder what happened to them 
>> (the manuals, I mean)?
> 
> Sun *Computer* Australia, of course; sigh...
> 
> -- Dave

Peter Yardley
peter.martin.yardley@gmail.com

[TUHS] Re: Proliferation of book print styles

[Kevin Bowling]

On Sat, Jun 1, 2024 at 7:31 PM Will Senn <will.senn@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Today, as I was digging more into nroff/troff and such, and bemoaning the lack of brevity of modern text. I got to thinking about the old days and what might have gone wrong with book production that got us where we are today.
>
> First, I wanna ask, tongue in cheek, sort of... As the inventors and early pioneers in the area of moving from typesetters to print on demand... do you feel a bit like the Manhattan project - did you maybe put too much power into the hands of folks who probably shouldn't have that power?
>
> But seriously, I know the period of time where we went from hot metal typesetting to the digital era was an eyeblink in history but do y'all recall how it went down? Were you surprised when folks settled on word processors in favor of markup? Do you think we've progressed in the area of ease of creating documentation and printing it making it viewable and accurate since 1980?
>
> I didn't specifically mention unix, but unix history is forever bound to the evolution of documents and printing, so I figure it's fair game for TUHS and isn't yet COFF :).
>
> Later,
>
> Will

I think your other topic is closely related but I chose this one to reply to.

I own something well north of 10,000 technical and engineering books
so I will appoint myself as an amateur librarian.

When I was younger, I had the false notion that anything new is good.
This attitude permates a lot of society.  Including professional
libraries.  They have a lot of collection management practices around
deciding what and when to pitch something and a big one is whether the
work is still in print, while a more sophisticated collection will
also take into account circulation numbers (how often it is checked
out).  A lot of that is undoubtedly the real costs surrounding storing
and displaying something (an archived book has a marginal cost, a
publically accessible displayed book presumably has a higher
associated cost) as well as the desire to remain current and provide
value to the library's membership.

From what I have seen, there isn't much notion of retaining or
promoting a particular work unless it remains in print.  As an
example, K&R C is still in print and would be retained by most
libraries.  The whole thing becomes a bit ouroboros because that leads
to more copies being printed, and it remaining in collections, and
being read.  Obviously, this is a case of a great piece of work
benefiting from the whole ordeal.  But for more niche topics, that
kind of feedback loop doesn't happen.  So the whole thing comes down
in a house of cards... the publisher guesses how many books to print,
a glut of them are produced, they enter circulation, and then it goes
out of print in a few years.  A few years later it is purged from the
public libraries.  As an end user, one benefit to this collapse is
that used books are basically flooded into the market and you can get
many books for a fraction of their retail price used.. but it becomes
difficult to know _what_ to get if you don't have an expert guide or
somewhere to browse and select for yourself.

So why does this all matter to your more meta question of why less
great books?  There is less to no money in it nowadays for authors.
The above example of library circulation represented a large number of
guaranteed sales to wealthy institutions (academic and government =
wealth, don't let them pretend otherwise).  Except now many libraries
have downsized their physical collections to make room for multimedia
or just lower density use of space.  So there are less guaranteed
sales.

Another facet of the same coin, one reason printed books are great has
to do with the team surrounding their production.  If you look near
the colophon, you will often find a textbook will have quite a few
people involved in moving a manuscript to production.  This obviously
costs a lot of money.  As things move more to ebook and print on
demand, it's an obvious place to cut publishing expenses and throw all
the work directly onto the author.  That may result in cheaper books
and maybe(?) more revenue for the author, but it won't have the same
quality that a professional publishing team can bring to the table.

As to my deliberate decision to accumulate the dead trees and ink,
it's because although online docs are great I find my best learning is
offline while I use the online docs more like mental jogs for a
particular API or refamiliarizing myself with the problem domain.  I
have some grandeur ambitions that first involve a large scanning
project but that will have to await more self funding.

Regards,
Kevin

[TUHS] Re: Proliferation of book print styles

[Marc Rochkind]

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True enough, Kevin, but with the decline of printed books and the increase
in online docs, I rarely find what I'm looking for in a printed book and,
when I think I have, the price is very high for what may turn out to be a
bad guess. Browsing a bookstore for serious computer books is no longer
possible, except maybe in very large cities.

For example, for an upcoming project I need up-to-date and authoritative
information on Kotlin and AWS S3 APIs.

Living in the past, I find, is no help!

Marc Rochkind
(author of the first book on UNIX programming)

On Sun, Jun 2, 2024, 7:12 AM Kevin Bowling <kevin.bowling@kev009.com> wrote:

> On Sat, Jun 1, 2024 at 7:31 PM Will Senn <will.senn@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Today, as I was digging more into nroff/troff and such, and bemoaning
> the lack of brevity of modern text. I got to thinking about the old days
> and what might have gone wrong with book production that got us where we
> are today.
> >
> > First, I wanna ask, tongue in cheek, sort of... As the inventors and
> early pioneers in the area of moving from typesetters to print on demand...
> do you feel a bit like the Manhattan project - did you maybe put too much
> power into the hands of folks who probably shouldn't have that power?
> >
> > But seriously, I know the period of time where we went from hot metal
> typesetting to the digital era was an eyeblink in history but do y'all
> recall how it went down? Were you surprised when folks settled on word
> processors in favor of markup? Do you think we've progressed in the area of
> ease of creating documentation and printing it making it viewable and
> accurate since 1980?
> >
> > I didn't specifically mention unix, but unix history is forever bound to
> the evolution of documents and printing, so I figure it's fair game for
> TUHS and isn't yet COFF :).
> >
> > Later,
> >
> > Will
>
> I think your other topic is closely related but I chose this one to reply
> to.
>
> I own something well north of 10,000 technical and engineering books
> so I will appoint myself as an amateur librarian.
>
> When I was younger, I had the false notion that anything new is good.
> This attitude permates a lot of society.  Including professional
> libraries.  They have a lot of collection management practices around
> deciding what and when to pitch something and a big one is whether the
> work is still in print, while a more sophisticated collection will
> also take into account circulation numbers (how often it is checked
> out).  A lot of that is undoubtedly the real costs surrounding storing
> and displaying something (an archived book has a marginal cost, a
> publically accessible displayed book presumably has a higher
> associated cost) as well as the desire to remain current and provide
> value to the library's membership.
>
> From what I have seen, there isn't much notion of retaining or
> promoting a particular work unless it remains in print.  As an
> example, K&R C is still in print and would be retained by most
> libraries.  The whole thing becomes a bit ouroboros because that leads
> to more copies being printed, and it remaining in collections, and
> being read.  Obviously, this is a case of a great piece of work
> benefiting from the whole ordeal.  But for more niche topics, that
> kind of feedback loop doesn't happen.  So the whole thing comes down
> in a house of cards... the publisher guesses how many books to print,
> a glut of them are produced, they enter circulation, and then it goes
> out of print in a few years.  A few years later it is purged from the
> public libraries.  As an end user, one benefit to this collapse is
> that used books are basically flooded into the market and you can get
> many books for a fraction of their retail price used.. but it becomes
> difficult to know _what_ to get if you don't have an expert guide or
> somewhere to browse and select for yourself.
>
> So why does this all matter to your more meta question of why less
> great books?  There is less to no money in it nowadays for authors.
> The above example of library circulation represented a large number of
> guaranteed sales to wealthy institutions (academic and government =
> wealth, don't let them pretend otherwise).  Except now many libraries
> have downsized their physical collections to make room for multimedia
> or just lower density use of space.  So there are less guaranteed
> sales.
>
> Another facet of the same coin, one reason printed books are great has
> to do with the team surrounding their production.  If you look near
> the colophon, you will often find a textbook will have quite a few
> people involved in moving a manuscript to production.  This obviously
> costs a lot of money.  As things move more to ebook and print on
> demand, it's an obvious place to cut publishing expenses and throw all
> the work directly onto the author.  That may result in cheaper books
> and maybe(?) more revenue for the author, but it won't have the same
> quality that a professional publishing team can bring to the table.
>
> As to my deliberate decision to accumulate the dead trees and ink,
> it's because although online docs are great I find my best learning is
> offline while I use the online docs more like mental jogs for a
> particular API or refamiliarizing myself with the problem domain.  I
> have some grandeur ambitions that first involve a large scanning
> project but that will have to await more self funding.
>
> Regards,
> Kevin
>

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[TUHS] Re: Proliferation of book print styles

[Will Senn]

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Marc, it and its successors are great books for sure, thanks for writing 
them!

I like having access to digital works, no complaints about access other 
than I wish I had access to everything ever written and some way to sort 
through it all quickly and easily. I'm more inclined to gripe about the 
quality of the work than it's medium. Both the writing quality and the 
production quality. If the target is pdf, make it a good pdf that when 
printed is a space considerate, easy to read, and efficient to process 
work, and when it's target is screen, do the same.

My only real gripe about the medium, is the disconnect between quality 
writing and production, and the unavoidable but hidden nature of 
proportions that are inherent in the virtual medium. A crazy example... 
I recently got out my 8086 handbook because I was doing x64 assembly 
work and couldn't locate what I was looking for in the x64 equivalent 10 
volume set online. A quick flip through the pages found what I needed 
and I was on my way. So, being a thoughtful person ;), I figured it was 
just a matter of having the book on hand, so I order one up... a week 
later, my x64 "manual arrived", all 10 volumes in a box about 14 inches 
tall, and 8 1/2 by 11 and weighing, well, I only picked it up once, but 
it was friggin' heavy as in bend the knees heavy. Anyhow, I dutifully 
opened it up, pulled out the relevant "book", volume 3 part 3 or 
something and flipped and flipped and flipped some more and found the 8 
pages discussing the same thing covered in a paragraph in the 8086 book. 
Now, I realize that parallel pipelines of AVR 512 SIMPLEX/42 has some 
impact on the REPNZ command in situations where the quarf rejects the 
quam, but really pages for a paragraph and not because it required 
pages, they could have single spaced the document, proportioned the 
margins to a readable width, put the base cases in prominent positions 
and put the quarf and quam notes in separate appendices. They didn't - 
they just keep adding and adding and adding and the page count just 
keeps growing and growing. Why? Because they can and because folks are 
hungry for information.

I appreciate that they put it out there, but is it ok for me to wish it 
were of higher quality and to note that the old stuff was better? BTW, I 
didn't read the 8086 manual back in the day, when it was printed, I read 
it the day after I went looking at the x64 docs.

Will



On 6/2/24 3:08 AM, Marc Rochkind wrote:
> True enough, Kevin, but with the decline of printed books and the 
> increase in online docs, I rarely find what I'm looking for in a 
> printed book and, when I think I have, the price is very high for what 
> may turn out to be a bad guess. Browsing a bookstore for serious 
> computer books is no longer possible, except maybe in very large cities.
>
> For example, for an upcoming project I need up-to-date and 
> authoritative information on Kotlin and AWS S3 APIs.
>
> Living in the past, I find, is no help!
>
> Marc Rochkind
> (author of the first book on UNIX programming)
>
> On Sun, Jun 2, 2024, 7:12 AM Kevin Bowling <kevin.bowling@kev009.com> 
> wrote:
>
>     On Sat, Jun 1, 2024 at 7:31 PM Will Senn <will.senn@gmail.com> wrote:
>     >
>     > Today, as I was digging more into nroff/troff and such, and
>     bemoaning the lack of brevity of modern text. I got to thinking
>     about the old days and what might have gone wrong with book
>     production that got us where we are today.
>     >
>     > First, I wanna ask, tongue in cheek, sort of... As the inventors
>     and early pioneers in the area of moving from typesetters to print
>     on demand... do you feel a bit like the Manhattan project - did
>     you maybe put too much power into the hands of folks who probably
>     shouldn't have that power?
>     >
>     > But seriously, I know the period of time where we went from hot
>     metal typesetting to the digital era was an eyeblink in history
>     but do y'all recall how it went down? Were you surprised when
>     folks settled on word processors in favor of markup? Do you think
>     we've progressed in the area of ease of creating documentation and
>     printing it making it viewable and accurate since 1980?
>     >
>     > I didn't specifically mention unix, but unix history is forever
>     bound to the evolution of documents and printing, so I figure it's
>     fair game for TUHS and isn't yet COFF :).
>     >
>     > Later,
>     >
>     > Will
>
>     I think your other topic is closely related but I chose this one
>     to reply to.
>
>     I own something well north of 10,000 technical and engineering books
>     so I will appoint myself as an amateur librarian.
>
>     When I was younger, I had the false notion that anything new is good.
>     This attitude permates a lot of society.  Including professional
>     libraries.  They have a lot of collection management practices around
>     deciding what and when to pitch something and a big one is whether the
>     work is still in print, while a more sophisticated collection will
>     also take into account circulation numbers (how often it is checked
>     out).  A lot of that is undoubtedly the real costs surrounding storing
>     and displaying something (an archived book has a marginal cost, a
>     publically accessible displayed book presumably has a higher
>     associated cost) as well as the desire to remain current and provide
>     value to the library's membership.
>
>     From what I have seen, there isn't much notion of retaining or
>     promoting a particular work unless it remains in print.  As an
>     example, K&R C is still in print and would be retained by most
>     libraries.  The whole thing becomes a bit ouroboros because that leads
>     to more copies being printed, and it remaining in collections, and
>     being read.  Obviously, this is a case of a great piece of work
>     benefiting from the whole ordeal.  But for more niche topics, that
>     kind of feedback loop doesn't happen.  So the whole thing comes down
>     in a house of cards... the publisher guesses how many books to print,
>     a glut of them are produced, they enter circulation, and then it goes
>     out of print in a few years.  A few years later it is purged from the
>     public libraries.  As an end user, one benefit to this collapse is
>     that used books are basically flooded into the market and you can get
>     many books for a fraction of their retail price used.. but it becomes
>     difficult to know _what_ to get if you don't have an expert guide or
>     somewhere to browse and select for yourself.
>
>     So why does this all matter to your more meta question of why less
>     great books?  There is less to no money in it nowadays for authors.
>     The above example of library circulation represented a large number of
>     guaranteed sales to wealthy institutions (academic and government =
>     wealth, don't let them pretend otherwise).  Except now many libraries
>     have downsized their physical collections to make room for multimedia
>     or just lower density use of space.  So there are less guaranteed
>     sales.
>
>     Another facet of the same coin, one reason printed books are great has
>     to do with the team surrounding their production.  If you look near
>     the colophon, you will often find a textbook will have quite a few
>     people involved in moving a manuscript to production.  This obviously
>     costs a lot of money.  As things move more to ebook and print on
>     demand, it's an obvious place to cut publishing expenses and throw all
>     the work directly onto the author.  That may result in cheaper books
>     and maybe(?) more revenue for the author, but it won't have the same
>     quality that a professional publishing team can bring to the table.
>
>     As to my deliberate decision to accumulate the dead trees and ink,
>     it's because although online docs are great I find my best learning is
>     offline while I use the online docs more like mental jogs for a
>     particular API or refamiliarizing myself with the problem domain.  I
>     have some grandeur ambitions that first involve a large scanning
>     project but that will have to await more self funding.
>
>     Regards,
>     Kevin
>

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[TUHS] Re: Proliferation of book print styles

[Kevin Bowling]

On Sun, Jun 2, 2024 at 1:08 AM Marc Rochkind <mrochkind@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> True enough, Kevin, but with the decline of printed books and the increase in online docs, I rarely find what I'm looking for in a printed book and, when I think I have, the price is very high for what may turn out to be a bad guess. Browsing a bookstore for serious computer books is no longer possible, except maybe in very large cities.

Agreed, bookstores are more or less dead.  I used the Internet Archive
a lot to inform my pre-purchasing decisions but the copyright
enforcement has caught up there.

> For example, for an upcoming project I need up-to-date and authoritative information on Kotlin and AWS S3 APIs.

I believe there are decent Kotlin books out.  There are some "fast"
publishers like Manning, Apress, and Packt (maybe in rough order of
quality..) that put out a lot of ephemeral literature but occasionally
have some fairly good works.  There aren't a lot of consistent bangers
like Prentice-Hall PTR was putting out back in the day although I am
generally impressed with some of the work Pearson is putting out.  No
Starch is also generally a winner, although a little less hard sciency
and more pop.

S3 is, as a user, so trivial I am not sure it warrants a book.  In the
past "cookbook" style books were common and maybe even useful.  When I
was getting started, I was thirsty for easy copy+paste solutions so
that I didn't have to strain much thought to get results.  I believe
Large Language Models are good enough to subsume some of that now.

On the other hand, a good book on building applications in a
cloud-native way definitely will shave a year or two off the learning
curve.  What and why seem to be more enduring than how.

>
> Living in the past, I find, is no help!

I don't think I live in the past, I am working on similar technologies
you mention to earn a living in the present.  One thing I failed to
mention in my post, and I think related to all this is the utility of
Large Language Models.  In your example above, the best current LLMs
would be helpful for S3 and a little less so (but not useless) for
Kotlin.  However, LLMs still can't really help with the synthesis of
good overall design and taste while an enduring book will impart both
on an intrepid reader that should outlive the details being discussed.
No doubt, whatever you are doing now is informed by your past.

One other anecdote, in my recent passion of learning digital logic
design, I find even the most recent textbooks are well referenced to
papers and books of the past which is a bit of a contrast to
programming literature.  Most will go back to Boole's "Studies of
Logic & Probability" as the basis.  Lots of papers referenced from the
40s and books from the 70s and 80s still have authority if you are
serious about the subject - Quine, McClusky, RK Richards, etc had a
lot to say early on and it is very much still valid.

>
> Marc Rochkind
> (author of the first book on UNIX programming)

Yes, I recognized your name and have your books.

>
> On Sun, Jun 2, 2024, 7:12 AM Kevin Bowling <kevin.bowling@kev009.com> wrote:
>>
>> On Sat, Jun 1, 2024 at 7:31 PM Will Senn <will.senn@gmail.com> wrote:
>> >
>> > Today, as I was digging more into nroff/troff and such, and bemoaning the lack of brevity of modern text. I got to thinking about the old days and what might have gone wrong with book production that got us where we are today.
>> >
>> > First, I wanna ask, tongue in cheek, sort of... As the inventors and early pioneers in the area of moving from typesetters to print on demand... do you feel a bit like the Manhattan project - did you maybe put too much power into the hands of folks who probably shouldn't have that power?
>> >
>> > But seriously, I know the period of time where we went from hot metal typesetting to the digital era was an eyeblink in history but do y'all recall how it went down? Were you surprised when folks settled on word processors in favor of markup? Do you think we've progressed in the area of ease of creating documentation and printing it making it viewable and accurate since 1980?
>> >
>> > I didn't specifically mention unix, but unix history is forever bound to the evolution of documents and printing, so I figure it's fair game for TUHS and isn't yet COFF :).
>> >
>> > Later,
>> >
>> > Will
>>
>> I think your other topic is closely related but I chose this one to reply to.
>>
>> I own something well north of 10,000 technical and engineering books
>> so I will appoint myself as an amateur librarian.
>>
>> When I was younger, I had the false notion that anything new is good.
>> This attitude permates a lot of society.  Including professional
>> libraries.  They have a lot of collection management practices around
>> deciding what and when to pitch something and a big one is whether the
>> work is still in print, while a more sophisticated collection will
>> also take into account circulation numbers (how often it is checked
>> out).  A lot of that is undoubtedly the real costs surrounding storing
>> and displaying something (an archived book has a marginal cost, a
>> publically accessible displayed book presumably has a higher
>> associated cost) as well as the desire to remain current and provide
>> value to the library's membership.
>>
>> From what I have seen, there isn't much notion of retaining or
>> promoting a particular work unless it remains in print.  As an
>> example, K&R C is still in print and would be retained by most
>> libraries.  The whole thing becomes a bit ouroboros because that leads
>> to more copies being printed, and it remaining in collections, and
>> being read.  Obviously, this is a case of a great piece of work
>> benefiting from the whole ordeal.  But for more niche topics, that
>> kind of feedback loop doesn't happen.  So the whole thing comes down
>> in a house of cards... the publisher guesses how many books to print,
>> a glut of them are produced, they enter circulation, and then it goes
>> out of print in a few years.  A few years later it is purged from the
>> public libraries.  As an end user, one benefit to this collapse is
>> that used books are basically flooded into the market and you can get
>> many books for a fraction of their retail price used.. but it becomes
>> difficult to know _what_ to get if you don't have an expert guide or
>> somewhere to browse and select for yourself.
>>
>> So why does this all matter to your more meta question of why less
>> great books?  There is less to no money in it nowadays for authors.
>> The above example of library circulation represented a large number of
>> guaranteed sales to wealthy institutions (academic and government =
>> wealth, don't let them pretend otherwise).  Except now many libraries
>> have downsized their physical collections to make room for multimedia
>> or just lower density use of space.  So there are less guaranteed
>> sales.
>>
>> Another facet of the same coin, one reason printed books are great has
>> to do with the team surrounding their production.  If you look near
>> the colophon, you will often find a textbook will have quite a few
>> people involved in moving a manuscript to production.  This obviously
>> costs a lot of money.  As things move more to ebook and print on
>> demand, it's an obvious place to cut publishing expenses and throw all
>> the work directly onto the author.  That may result in cheaper books
>> and maybe(?) more revenue for the author, but it won't have the same
>> quality that a professional publishing team can bring to the table.
>>
>> As to my deliberate decision to accumulate the dead trees and ink,
>> it's because although online docs are great I find my best learning is
>> offline while I use the online docs more like mental jogs for a
>> particular API or refamiliarizing myself with the problem domain.  I
>> have some grandeur ambitions that first involve a large scanning
>> project but that will have to await more self funding.
>>
>> Regards,
>> Kevin

[TUHS] Re: Proliferation of book print styles

[Will Senn]

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On 6/1/24 11:03 PM, Kevin Bowling wrote:
> I think your other topic is closely related but I chose this one to reply to.
>
> I own something well north of 10,000 technical and engineering books
> so I will appoint myself as an amateur librarian.
>
> When I was younger, I had the false notion that anything new is good.
> This attitude permates a lot of society.  Including professional
> libraries.  They have a lot of collection management practices around
> deciding what and when to pitch something and a big one is whether the
> work is still in print, while a more sophisticated collection will
> also take into account circulation numbers (how often it is checked
> out).  A lot of that is undoubtedly the real costs surrounding storing
> and displaying something (an archived book has a marginal cost, a
> publically accessible displayed book presumably has a higher
> associated cost) as well as the desire to remain current and provide
> value to the library's membership.
>
>  From what I have seen, there isn't much notion of retaining or
> promoting a particular work unless it remains in print.  As an
> example, K&R C is still in print and would be retained by most
> libraries.  The whole thing becomes a bit ouroboros because that leads
> to more copies being printed, and it remaining in collections, and
> being read.  Obviously, this is a case of a great piece of work
> benefiting from the whole ordeal.  But for more niche topics, that
> kind of feedback loop doesn't happen.  So the whole thing comes down
> in a house of cards... the publisher guesses how many books to print,
> a glut of them are produced, they enter circulation, and then it goes
> out of print in a few years.  A few years later it is purged from the
> public libraries.  As an end user, one benefit to this collapse is
> that used books are basically flooded into the market and you can get
> many books for a fraction of their retail price used.. but it becomes
> difficult to know _what_ to get if you don't have an expert guide or
> somewhere to browse and select for yourself.
>
> So why does this all matter to your more meta question of why less
> great books?  There is less to no money in it nowadays for authors.
> The above example of library circulation represented a large number of
> guaranteed sales to wealthy institutions (academic and government =
> wealth, don't let them pretend otherwise).  Except now many libraries
> have downsized their physical collections to make room for multimedia
> or just lower density use of space.  So there are less guaranteed
> sales.
>
> Another facet of the same coin, one reason printed books are great has
> to do with the team surrounding their production.  If you look near
> the colophon, you will often find a textbook will have quite a few
> people involved in moving a manuscript to production.  This obviously
> costs a lot of money.  As things move more to ebook and print on
> demand, it's an obvious place to cut publishing expenses and throw all
> the work directly onto the author.  That may result in cheaper books
> and maybe(?) more revenue for the author, but it won't have the same
> quality that a professional publishing team can bring to the table.
>
> As to my deliberate decision to accumulate the dead trees and ink,
> it's because although online docs are great I find my best learning is
> offline while I use the online docs more like mental jogs for a
> particular API or refamiliarizing myself with the problem domain.  I
> have some grandeur ambitions that first involve a large scanning
> project but that will have to await more self funding.
>
> Regards,
> Kevin
Thanks. This is really clear and while I'd had similar thoughts, I 
hadn't thought through the entire supply chain like this. The publishing 
side is one thing, but the library's role in things. I gotta think some 
more about that - the Mattew Effect, acquisitions, and weeding... 
Seriously, I never thought about the library's outsized influence on 
supply. Duh!

As for digital materials, I'm pretty sure no one on the list is 
unaccustomed to vast amounts of reading digital materials so would 
qualify as experienced consumers at the least, producers most likely, 
and some even experts on the subject. I, for one, read many many pdf (or 
convertable to pdf) works every week. Still, I vastly prefer print for 
serious reading or study. I have learned the value of marking up my text 
and I find myself writing voluminously alongside much of what I read. It 
seems like I have to work much harder, cognitively, to retain material 
that I view online and having my notes disconnected from the 
corresponding material is frustrating. Gotta print important stuff, no 
way around it for me.

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[TUHS] Re: Proliferation of book print styles

[Douglas McIlroy]

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> Were you surprised when folks settled on word processors in favor of
markup?

I'm not sure what you're asking. "Word processor" was a term coming into
prominence when Unix was in its infancy. Unix itself was sold to management
partly on the promise of using it to make a word processor. All word
processors used typewriters and were markup-based. Screens, which
eventually enabled WYSIWYG, were not affordable for widespread use.

Perhaps the question you meant to ask was whether we were surprised when
WYSIWYG took over word-processing for the masses. No, we weren't, but we
weren't attracted to it either, because it sacrificed markup's potential
for expressing the logical structure of documents and thus fostering
portability of text among distinct physical forms, e.g. man pages on
terminals and in book form or  technical papers as TMs and as journal
articles. WYSIWYG was also unsuitable for typesetting math. (Microsoft Word
clumsily diverts to a separate markup pane for math.)

Moreover, WYSIWYG was out of sympathy with Unix philosophy, as it kept
documents in a form difficult for other tools to process for unanticipated
purposes, In this regard, I still regret that Luca Cardelli and Mark
Manasse moved on from Bell Labs before they finished their dream of Blue, a
WYSIWYG editor for markup documents, I don't know yet whether that blue-sky
goal is achievable. (.docx may be seen as a ponderous latter-day attempt.
Does anyone know whether it has fostered tool use?)

Doug

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[TUHS] Re: Proliferation of book print styles

[arnold]

Douglas McIlroy <douglas.mcilroy@dartmouth.edu> wrote:

> In this regard, I still regret that Luca Cardelli and Mark
> Manasse moved on from Bell Labs before they finished their dream of Blue, a
> WYSIWYG editor for markup documents, I don't know yet whether that blue-sky
> goal is achievable.

lyx does this for LaTeX. It's been around for a long time. See lyx.org.

Arnold

[TUHS] Re: Proliferation of book print styles

[Will Senn]

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On 6/2/24 7:39 AM, Douglas McIlroy wrote:
>
> Perhaps the question you meant to ask was whether we were surprised 
> when WYSIWYG took over word-processing for the masses. No, we weren't, 
> but we weren't attracted to it either, because it sacrificed markup's 
> potential for expressing the logical structure of documents and thus 
> fostering portability of text among distinct physical forms, e.g. man 
> pages on terminals and in book form or  technical papers as TMs and as 
> journal articles. WYSIWYG was also unsuitable for typesetting math. 
> (Microsoft Word clumsily diverts to a separate markup pane for math.)
>
Yup, that's what I was really meaning to ask and what I was hoping to 
hear about.

> Moreover, WYSIWYG was out of sympathy with Unix philosophy, as it kept 
> documents in a form difficult for other tools to process for 
> unanticipated purposes, In this regard, I still regret that Luca 
> Cardelli and Mark Manasse moved on from Bell Labs before they finished 
> their dream of Blue, a WYSIWYG editor for markup documents, I don't 
> know yet whether that blue-sky goal is achievable. (.docx may be seen 
> as a ponderous latter-day attempt. Does anyone know whether it has 
> fostered tool use?)
>
Interesting, I was wishing for something along those lines after using 
TeX Studio for a while. A quick preview side by side is nice, but 
wouldn't it be great to be able to work on the preview side of the pane 
while the markup side changes (as minimally as possible) showing your 
changes as you make them and being able to switch back and forth? 
Personally, I prefer troff to tex, but just idea of markup and WYSIWYG 
is enticing.

Will

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[TUHS] Re: Proliferation of book print styles

[Al Kossow]

On 6/2/24 5:39 AM, Douglas McIlroy wrote:
>> Were you surprised when folks settled on word processors in favor of markup?

I was disappointed the world tolerates the fugly typography of web pages.
Hundreds of years of readability knowledge thrown out the window.

[TUHS] Re: Proliferation of book print styles

[Ralph Corderoy]

Hi Al,

> I was disappointed the world tolerates the fugly typography of web
> pages.  Hundreds of years of readability knowledge thrown out the
> window.

PDFs of books have declined too, and with that the book held in the
hand.  It's as if no aesthetic judging of each page's appearance has
occurred; whatever the program produces is correct.  Probably because
many books are about technologies with little lifespan; either it will
wane or version 2.0 will need a new book.  Books on topics with a longer
life are dragged down.

Full justification is still often used.  No breaks around the start/stop
parenthetical em dash causes the very long ‘word’ to start the next
line; the line before becomes 40% space.  Sentences which start ‘I’ end
a line.  Or page.  Sans serif used so that ‘I’ is as thin as can be and
the font, to my eyes, generally lacks flow.

When there's the choice, I skim the PDF and if it's good, go with that.
Otherwise, I pluck for the worse-looking EPUB, HTML under the covers,
because I can unpack it with bsdtar(1), tinker with the HTML and CSS to
fix the worst of the appearance, and then return it to foo.epub for
reading.

-- 
Cheers, Ralph.

[TUHS] Re: Proliferation of book print styles

[Dave Horsfall]

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On Mon, 3 Jun 2024, Ralph Corderoy wrote:

> Full justification is still often used.  No breaks around the start/stop 
> parenthetical em dash causes the very long ‘word’ to start the next 
> line; the line before becomes 40% space.  Sentences which start ‘I’ end 
> a line.  Or page.  Sans serif used so that ‘I’ is as thin as can be and 
> the font, to my eyes, generally lacks flow.

What he said...

And let's not even talk about hyphenating the-
rapist.

-- Dave

[TUHS] Re: Proliferation of book print styles

[Stuff Received]

On 2024-06-02 08:39, Douglas McIlroy wrote (in part):

> Perhaps the question you meant to ask was whether we were surprised when 
> WYSIWYG took over word-processing for the masses. No, we weren't, but we 
> weren't attracted to it either, because it sacrificed markup's potential 
> for expressing the logical structure of documents and thus fostering 
> portability of text among distinct physical forms, e.g. man pages on 
> terminals and in book form or  technical papers as TMs and as journal 
> articles. WYSIWYG was also unsuitable for typesetting math. (Microsoft 
> Word clumsily diverts to a separate markup pane for math.)

I liken suffering through WYSIWYG for math to searching through drawers 
of movable type pieces for the desired piece.

Some time ago, I read a nice article titled "What you see is all you 
get" but I cannot find the link (and Google fails me miserably).  Found 
this, though: What has WSYIWYG done for us: 
https://web.archive.org/web/20050207015413/http://www.ideography.co.uk/library/seybold/WYSIWYG.html

S.

[TUHS] Re: Proliferation of book print styles

[Ralph Corderoy]

Hi S.,

> Some time ago, I read a nice article titled "What you see is all you 
> get" but I cannot find the link (and Google fails me miserably).

Could it have been ‘Text processing vs word processors’ from Peter
Schaffter, the author of the troff mom macros.  It starts with

   ‘When you use a word processor, your screen persistently displays an
    updated image of the finished document.  Word for word, line for
    line, What You See Is What You Get.’
        — https://schaffter.ca/mom/mom-02.html

His -mom, have to be careful here, covers a lot of ground.
https://schaffter.ca/mom/mom-01a.html

-- 
Cheers, Ralph.

[TUHS] Re: Proliferation of book print styles

[Michael Kjörling]

On 2 Jun 2024 08:39 -0400, from douglas.mcilroy@dartmouth.edu (Douglas McIlroy):
> In this regard, I still regret that Luca Cardelli and Mark
> Manasse moved on from Bell Labs before they finished their dream of Blue, a
> WYSIWYG editor for markup documents, I don't know yet whether that blue-sky
> goal is achievable. (.docx may be seen as a ponderous latter-day attempt.
> Does anyone know whether it has fostered tool use?)

Does Markdown count?

Especially when combined with LaTeX support for typesetting math, it's
probably quite good enough for most peoples' needs outside of niche
applications; and there are WYSIWYG editors (not just text editors
with a preview, but actual WYSIWYG editors) which use Markdown as the
storage format.

Of course, what Markdown very specifically does _not_ even try to do
is provide any strong presentation guarantees. In that sense, it's
quite a lot like early HTML. (And that, naturally, results in people
doing things like using different heading levels not to represent the
document outline, but rather because the result renders as what they
feel is an "appropriate" text size at that point in the document.)

-- 
Michael Kjörling                     🔗 https://michael.kjorling.se
“Remember when, on the Internet, nobody cared that you were a dog?”

[TUHS] Re: Proliferation of book print styles

[Åke Nordin]

On 2024-06-02 17:21, Michael Kjörling wrote:

> On 2 Jun 2024 08:39 -0400, from douglas.mcilroy@dartmouth.edu (Douglas McIlroy):
>> In this regard, I still regret that Luca Cardelli and Mark
>> Manasse moved on from Bell Labs before they finished their dream of Blue, a
>> WYSIWYG editor for markup documents, I don't know yet whether that blue-sky
>> goal is achievable. (.docx may be seen as a ponderous latter-day attempt.
>> Does anyone know whether it has fostered tool use?)
> Does Markdown count?
>
> Especially when combined with LaTeX support for typesetting math, it's
> probably quite good enough for most peoples' needs outside of niche
> applications; and there are WYSIWYG editors (not just text editors
> with a preview, but actual WYSIWYG editors) which use Markdown as the
> storage format.
>
> Of course, what Markdown very specifically does _not_ even try to do
> is provide any strong presentation guarantees.

I haven't really participated in any real publishing endeavors
since the times of waxed sheets and scalpels, so I have precious
little firsthand experience with e.g. markdown, but I've read
quite the severe critique of its shortcomings. A prime example
is https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20170304230520 by
Ingo Schwarze, the main developer of mandoc together with Kristaps
Dzonsons.

This makes me believe that any WYSIWYG editor using markdown as
its storage format really uses some quite strict subset of it,
combined with its own incompatible extensions.

MfG,

-- 
Åke Nordin <ake.nordin@netia.se>, resident Net/Lunix/telecom geek.
Netia Data AB, Stockholm SWEDEN *46#7O466OI99#

[TUHS] Re: Proliferation of book print styles

[Marc Donner]

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The history of markup and WSYWYG (or, as a friend said, WYSIAYG - what you
see is all you get) is fascinating.

The early markup systems (runoff and its derivatives like troff, nroff,
IBM's SCRIPT) focused on manipulation of representation.  Normal, bold,
italic, font size, justification and centering, and so on, were the
vocabulary of the old systems.  These systems, to me, were assembler
language for contemporary phototypesetters.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s we began to get systems that, as Douglas
noted, could express the logical structure of documents.  GML and SCRIBE
were my first exposures to this way of thinking and they made life much
much better for the writer.

The standards work that created SGML went a bit overboard, to my taste.
The only really serious adopters of SGML that I can think of were the US
military, but there may have been others.

Along the way were some fascinating attempts at clever hybrids.  Mike
Cowlishaw built a markup system for the Oxford University Press back in the
early 1980s on secondment from IBM.  It had a rather elegant ability to
switch between markup mode and rendering mode so you could peek at how
something would look.  I know that it was used by OUP for the humongous
task of converting the OED from its old paper-based production framework to
the electronic system that they use today, though I have no idea what the
current details are.

The hybrid model is not dead, by the way.  The wikimedia system adopts it
... you may edit either in markup mode or in WSYWYG mode, though I find the
WSYWYG mode to be frustrating.  Sadly, the markdown stuff used by wikimedia
is pretty annoying to work with and the rendering is buggy and sometimes
incomprehensible (to me, at least).

Making a strong system that includes inline markup editing AND
WSYWYG editing with clean flipping between them would be fascinating.
Sadly, the markup specifications are flimsy and the ease of creating crazy
markup like <h1><b>blah blah</i></h2> in edit mode makes for some difficult
exception handling problems.

Marc
=====
nygeek.net
mindthegapdialogs.com/home <https://www.mindthegapdialogs.com/home>


On Sun, Jun 2, 2024 at 8:40 AM Douglas McIlroy <
douglas.mcilroy@dartmouth.edu> wrote:

> > Were you surprised when folks settled on word processors in favor of
> markup?
>
> I'm not sure what you're asking. "Word processor" was a term coming into
> prominence when Unix was in its infancy. Unix itself was sold to management
> partly on the promise of using it to make a word processor. All word
> processors used typewriters and were markup-based. Screens, which
> eventually enabled WYSIWYG, were not affordable for widespread use.
>
> Perhaps the question you meant to ask was whether we were surprised when
> WYSIWYG took over word-processing for the masses. No, we weren't, but we
> weren't attracted to it either, because it sacrificed markup's potential
> for expressing the logical structure of documents and thus fostering
> portability of text among distinct physical forms, e.g. man pages on
> terminals and in book form or  technical papers as TMs and as journal
> articles. WYSIWYG was also unsuitable for typesetting math. (Microsoft Word
> clumsily diverts to a separate markup pane for math.)
>
> Moreover, WYSIWYG was out of sympathy with Unix philosophy, as it kept
> documents in a form difficult for other tools to process for unanticipated
> purposes, In this regard, I still regret that Luca Cardelli and Mark
> Manasse moved on from Bell Labs before they finished their dream of Blue, a
> WYSIWYG editor for markup documents, I don't know yet whether that blue-sky
> goal is achievable. (.docx may be seen as a ponderous latter-day attempt.
> Does anyone know whether it has fostered tool use?)
>
> Doug
>

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[TUHS] Re: Proliferation of book print styles

[Larry McVoy]

I've been using this hybrid for decades, it re-renders every time you
write out the file:


#!/usr/bin/perl

# Run the command into PS.$USER
# go into a loop watching the file and rerun command whenever the file
# has changed.

use POSIX ":sys_wait_h";

$usage = "usage: $0 comand -args -args file [file ...]\n";

foreach $file (@ARGV) {
	next unless -f $file;
	push(@files, $file);
}
die $usage unless $#files > -1;
$cmd = "@ARGV > PS.$ENV{USER}";
$gv = "gv --spartan --antialias --media=letter PS.$ENV{USER}";

system "$cmd";
$pid = fork;
if ($pid == 0) {
	exec $gv;
	die $gv;
}
# Read all the files looking for .so's so we catch the implied list.
# I dunno if groff catches nested .so's but we don't.
foreach $file (@files) {
	$stat{$file} = (stat($file))[9];
	open(F, $file);
	while (<F>) {
		next unless /^\.so\s+(.*)\s*$/;
		$stat{$1} = (stat($1))[9];
	}
	close(F);
}
while (1) {
	select(undef, undef, undef, .2);
	$kid = waitpid($pid,&WNOHANG);
	exit 0 if (kill(0, $pid) != 1);
	$doit = 0;
	foreach $f (keys %stat) {
		if ($stat{$f} != (stat($f))[9]) {
			$stat{$f} = (stat($f))[9];
			$doit = 1;
		}
	}
	if ($doit) {
		system $cmd;
		kill(1, $pid);
	}
}

[TUHS] Re: Proliferation of book print styles

[Ralph Corderoy]

Hi Mark,

> Mike Cowlishaw built a markup system for the Oxford University Press
> back in the early 1980s on secondment from IBM.  It had a rather
> elegant ability to switch between markup mode and rendering mode so
> you could peek at how something would look.

I think that's his LEXX editor which did live parsing and could be
initialised with parsing tables.

    LEXX — A programmable structured editor
    DOI:10.1147/rd.311.0073
    https://www.researchgate.net/publication/224103825_LEXX-A_programmable_structured_editor

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LEXX_(text_editor)

> I know that it was used by OUP for the humongous task of converting
> the OED from its old paper-based production framework to the
> electronic system that they use today

Collins, a rival in dictionaries, used troff for a long time to produce
theirs.  Don't know what they do now.

The University of Nottingham chose device-independent troff for their
examination papers over TeX because the PDP-11 was affordable compared
to the VAX.  The troff source licence cost £4,000 around ’82.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/28692919_In-house_Preparation_of_Examination_Papers_using_troff_tbl_and_eqn


> Sadly, the markup specifications are flimsy

For markdown, the CommonMark folk have been improving this for a while.

    ‘We propose a standard, unambiguous syntax specification for
     Markdown, along with a suite of comprehensive tests to validate
     Markdown implementations against this specification.  We believe
     this is necessary, even essential, for the future of Markdown.

    ‘That’s what we call CommonMark.’

        — https://commonmark.org

> the ease of creating crazy markup like <h1><b>blah blah</i></h2> in
> edit mode makes for some difficult exception handling problems.

Just treat it as an error rather than attempt recovery?  Although the
rendered version could be flipped to, or viewed in parallel, it would be
read only and only get so far; the bug would need fixing in the mark-up
view.

-- 
Cheers, Ralph.

[TUHS] Re: Proliferation of book print styles

[Warner Losh]

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At the risk of venturing too far off into the weeds (though maybe it's too
late for that)

What do people think of the newer markup languages like Markdown or ASCII
Doctor? They seem more approachable than SGML or docbook, and a bit easier
to understand, though with less control, than troff, LaTeX or TeX.

To me they seem to be clever in that they infer the type of thing from the
extra context marking that you give it, and the marking is more intuitive
than the old-school markups (though still with some twists and sharp edges).

Warner

On Tue, Jun 4, 2024 at 7:22 AM Marc Donner <marc.donner@gmail.com> wrote:

> The history of markup and WSYWYG (or, as a friend said, WYSIAYG - what you
> see is all you get) is fascinating.
>
> The early markup systems (runoff and its derivatives like troff, nroff,
> IBM's SCRIPT) focused on manipulation of representation.  Normal, bold,
> italic, font size, justification and centering, and so on, were the
> vocabulary of the old systems.  These systems, to me, were assembler
> language for contemporary phototypesetters.
>
> In the late 1970s and early 1980s we began to get systems that, as Douglas
> noted, could express the logical structure of documents.  GML and SCRIBE
> were my first exposures to this way of thinking and they made life much
> much better for the writer.
>
> The standards work that created SGML went a bit overboard, to my taste.
> The only really serious adopters of SGML that I can think of were the US
> military, but there may have been others.
>
> Along the way were some fascinating attempts at clever hybrids.  Mike
> Cowlishaw built a markup system for the Oxford University Press back in the
> early 1980s on secondment from IBM.  It had a rather elegant ability to
> switch between markup mode and rendering mode so you could peek at how
> something would look.  I know that it was used by OUP for the humongous
> task of converting the OED from its old paper-based production framework to
> the electronic system that they use today, though I have no idea what the
> current details are.
>
> The hybrid model is not dead, by the way.  The wikimedia system adopts it
> ... you may edit either in markup mode or in WSYWYG mode, though I find the
> WSYWYG mode to be frustrating.  Sadly, the markdown stuff used by wikimedia
> is pretty annoying to work with and the rendering is buggy and sometimes
> incomprehensible (to me, at least).
>
> Making a strong system that includes inline markup editing AND
> WSYWYG editing with clean flipping between them would be fascinating.
> Sadly, the markup specifications are flimsy and the ease of creating crazy
> markup like <h1><b>blah blah</i></h2> in edit mode makes for some difficult
> exception handling problems.
>
> Marc
> =====
> nygeek.net
> mindthegapdialogs.com/home <https://www.mindthegapdialogs.com/home>
>
>
> On Sun, Jun 2, 2024 at 8:40 AM Douglas McIlroy <
> douglas.mcilroy@dartmouth.edu> wrote:
>
>> > Were you surprised when folks settled on word processors in favor of
>> markup?
>>
>> I'm not sure what you're asking. "Word processor" was a term coming into
>> prominence when Unix was in its infancy. Unix itself was sold to management
>> partly on the promise of using it to make a word processor. All word
>> processors used typewriters and were markup-based. Screens, which
>> eventually enabled WYSIWYG, were not affordable for widespread use.
>>
>> Perhaps the question you meant to ask was whether we were surprised when
>> WYSIWYG took over word-processing for the masses. No, we weren't, but we
>> weren't attracted to it either, because it sacrificed markup's potential
>> for expressing the logical structure of documents and thus fostering
>> portability of text among distinct physical forms, e.g. man pages on
>> terminals and in book form or  technical papers as TMs and as journal
>> articles. WYSIWYG was also unsuitable for typesetting math. (Microsoft Word
>> clumsily diverts to a separate markup pane for math.)
>>
>> Moreover, WYSIWYG was out of sympathy with Unix philosophy, as it kept
>> documents in a form difficult for other tools to process for unanticipated
>> purposes, In this regard, I still regret that Luca Cardelli and Mark
>> Manasse moved on from Bell Labs before they finished their dream of Blue, a
>> WYSIWYG editor for markup documents, I don't know yet whether that blue-sky
>> goal is achievable. (.docx may be seen as a ponderous latter-day attempt.
>> Does anyone know whether it has fostered tool use?)
>>
>> Doug
>>
>

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[TUHS] Re: Proliferation of book print styles

[Grant Taylor via TUHS]

On 6/4/24 9:53 AM, Warner Losh wrote:
> What do people think of the newer markup languages like Markdown or 
> ASCII Doctor? They seem more approachable than SGML or docbook, and a 
> bit easier to understand, though with less control, than troff, LaTeX or 
> TeX.

I find Markdown et al. leaving me wanting.

I personally prefer basic HTML for structure and function.  If I care 
enough I'll add some CSS on top for appearance candy.



-- 
Grant. . . .
unix || die

[TUHS] Re: Proliferation of book print styles

[Alexis]

Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com> writes:

> What do people think of the newer markup languages like Markdown 
> or ASCII
> Doctor? They seem more approachable than SGML or docbook, and a 
> bit easier
> to understand, though with less control, than troff, LaTeX or 
> TeX.

Speaking as someone who had to fight Markdown several years ago, 
when trying to write a converter from Markdown, and who found that 
programming language library authors generally seemed to assume 
you'd only ever want to convert to HTML ("No, we won't expose the 
parse tree"), this old critique by Ingo Schwarze strongly 
resonates with me:

  https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20170304230520


Alexis.

[TUHS] Re: Proliferation of book print styles

[arnold]

Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com> wrote:

> At the risk of venturing too far off into the weeds (though maybe it's too
> late for that)
>
> What do people think of the newer markup languages like Markdown or ASCII
> Doctor? They seem more approachable than SGML or docbook, and a bit easier
> to understand, though with less control, than troff, LaTeX or TeX.

Having written books in troff, DocBook (SGML and XML), Texinfo and
AsciiDoc, I can say that the latter two are much more pleasant
that the former two.

AsciiDoc is quite nice once you get to used to it, but sometimes getting
it to layout things exactly the way you want can be difficult. Also,
there aren't good free software toolchains for it to produce really
nice output. The production process for the AsciiDoc book went
AsciiDoc --> HTML --> Proprietary Formatter (Antenna House) --> PDF.

I have not written much MarkDown, but I agree that it's too sparse
for serious (book length) work.

My two cents,

Arnold

[TUHS] Re: Proliferation of book print styles

[Adam Thornton]

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On Tue, Jun 4, 2024 at 6:22 AM Marc Donner <marc.donner@gmail.com> wrote:

> The standards work that created SGML went a bit overboard, to my taste.
> The only really serious adopters of SGML that I can think of were the US
> military, but there may have been others.
>
>
Bookmaster (an IBM product, and I think what they used for their published
docs in the 90s into the 2000s?) was SGML based, if I remember correctly.
Writing in it was kind of lovely, and the traintrack diagrams for command
syntax were exceptionally well-done.

It made nice-looking docs (e.g.
https://distribution.sinenomine.net/opensolaris/install2.pdf).

Adam

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