* [TUHS] Proliferation of book print styles @ 2024-06-02 2:31 Will Senn 2024-06-02 2:44 ` [TUHS] " Peter Yardley ` (2 more replies) 0 siblings, 3 replies; 29+ messages in thread From: Will Senn @ 2024-06-02 2:31 UTC (permalink / raw) To: TUHS [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1098 bytes --] 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 [-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 1479 bytes --] ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 29+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] Re: Proliferation of book print styles 2024-06-02 2:31 [TUHS] Proliferation of book print styles Will Senn @ 2024-06-02 2:44 ` Peter Yardley 2024-06-03 21:42 ` James Frew 2024-06-02 4:03 ` Kevin Bowling 2024-06-02 12:39 ` Douglas McIlroy 2 siblings, 1 reply; 29+ messages in thread From: Peter Yardley @ 2024-06-02 2:44 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Will Senn; +Cc: TUHS 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 ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 29+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] Re: Proliferation of book print styles 2024-06-02 2:44 ` [TUHS] " Peter Yardley @ 2024-06-03 21:42 ` James Frew 2024-06-04 5:49 ` Dave Horsfall 0 siblings, 1 reply; 29+ messages in thread From: James Frew @ 2024-06-03 21:42 UTC (permalink / raw) To: tuhs 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. ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 29+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] Re: Proliferation of book print styles 2024-06-03 21:42 ` James Frew @ 2024-06-04 5:49 ` Dave Horsfall 2024-06-04 22:54 ` Dave Horsfall 0 siblings, 1 reply; 29+ messages in thread From: Dave Horsfall @ 2024-06-04 5:49 UTC (permalink / raw) To: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society 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 ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 29+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] Re: Proliferation of book print styles 2024-06-04 5:49 ` Dave Horsfall @ 2024-06-04 22:54 ` Dave Horsfall 2024-06-07 7:58 ` Peter Yardley 0 siblings, 1 reply; 29+ messages in thread From: Dave Horsfall @ 2024-06-04 22:54 UTC (permalink / raw) To: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society 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 ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 29+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] Re: Proliferation of book print styles 2024-06-04 22:54 ` Dave Horsfall @ 2024-06-07 7:58 ` Peter Yardley 0 siblings, 0 replies; 29+ messages in thread From: Peter Yardley @ 2024-06-07 7:58 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Dave Horsfall; +Cc: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society 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 ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 29+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] Re: Proliferation of book print styles 2024-06-02 2:31 [TUHS] Proliferation of book print styles Will Senn 2024-06-02 2:44 ` [TUHS] " Peter Yardley @ 2024-06-02 4:03 ` Kevin Bowling 2024-06-02 8:08 ` Marc Rochkind 2024-06-02 13:13 ` Will Senn 2024-06-02 12:39 ` Douglas McIlroy 2 siblings, 2 replies; 29+ messages in thread From: Kevin Bowling @ 2024-06-02 4:03 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Will Senn; +Cc: TUHS 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 ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 29+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] Re: Proliferation of book print styles 2024-06-02 4:03 ` Kevin Bowling @ 2024-06-02 8:08 ` Marc Rochkind 2024-06-02 13:50 ` Will Senn 2024-06-02 21:21 ` Kevin Bowling 2024-06-02 13:13 ` Will Senn 1 sibling, 2 replies; 29+ messages in thread From: Marc Rochkind @ 2024-06-02 8:08 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Kevin Bowling; +Cc: TUHS [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 5581 bytes --] 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 > [-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 6303 bytes --] ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 29+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] Re: Proliferation of book print styles 2024-06-02 8:08 ` Marc Rochkind @ 2024-06-02 13:50 ` Will Senn 2024-06-02 21:21 ` Kevin Bowling 1 sibling, 0 replies; 29+ messages in thread From: Will Senn @ 2024-06-02 13:50 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Marc Rochkind, Kevin Bowling; +Cc: TUHS [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 8492 bytes --] 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 > [-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 11342 bytes --] ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 29+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] Re: Proliferation of book print styles 2024-06-02 8:08 ` Marc Rochkind 2024-06-02 13:50 ` Will Senn @ 2024-06-02 21:21 ` Kevin Bowling 1 sibling, 0 replies; 29+ messages in thread From: Kevin Bowling @ 2024-06-02 21:21 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Marc Rochkind; +Cc: TUHS 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 ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 29+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] Re: Proliferation of book print styles 2024-06-02 4:03 ` Kevin Bowling 2024-06-02 8:08 ` Marc Rochkind @ 2024-06-02 13:13 ` Will Senn 1 sibling, 0 replies; 29+ messages in thread From: Will Senn @ 2024-06-02 13:13 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Kevin Bowling; +Cc: TUHS [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 4736 bytes --] 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. [-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 5095 bytes --] ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 29+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] Re: Proliferation of book print styles @ 2024-06-02 12:39 ` Douglas McIlroy 2024-06-02 12:45 ` arnold ` (5 more replies) 0 siblings, 6 replies; 29+ messages in thread From: Douglas McIlroy @ 2024-06-02 12:39 UTC (permalink / raw) To: TUHS main list [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1490 bytes --] > 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 [-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 2146 bytes --] ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 29+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] Re: Proliferation of book print styles 2024-06-02 12:39 ` Douglas McIlroy @ 2024-06-02 12:45 ` arnold 2024-06-02 12:55 ` Will Senn ` (4 subsequent siblings) 5 siblings, 0 replies; 29+ messages in thread From: arnold @ 2024-06-02 12:45 UTC (permalink / raw) To: tuhs, douglas.mcilroy 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 ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 29+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] Re: Proliferation of book print styles 2024-06-02 12:39 ` Douglas McIlroy 2024-06-02 12:45 ` arnold @ 2024-06-02 12:55 ` Will Senn 2024-06-02 14:31 ` Al Kossow ` (3 subsequent siblings) 5 siblings, 0 replies; 29+ messages in thread From: Will Senn @ 2024-06-02 12:55 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Douglas McIlroy, TUHS main list [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1702 bytes --] 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 [-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 2947 bytes --] ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 29+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] Re: Proliferation of book print styles 2024-06-02 12:39 ` Douglas McIlroy 2024-06-02 12:45 ` arnold 2024-06-02 12:55 ` Will Senn @ 2024-06-02 14:31 ` Al Kossow 2024-06-03 9:53 ` Ralph Corderoy 2024-06-02 14:48 ` Stuff Received ` (2 subsequent siblings) 5 siblings, 1 reply; 29+ messages in thread From: Al Kossow @ 2024-06-02 14:31 UTC (permalink / raw) To: tuhs 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. ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 29+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] Re: Proliferation of book print styles 2024-06-02 14:31 ` Al Kossow @ 2024-06-03 9:53 ` Ralph Corderoy 2024-06-04 4:26 ` Dave Horsfall 0 siblings, 1 reply; 29+ messages in thread From: Ralph Corderoy @ 2024-06-03 9:53 UTC (permalink / raw) To: tuhs 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. ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 29+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] Re: Proliferation of book print styles 2024-06-03 9:53 ` Ralph Corderoy @ 2024-06-04 4:26 ` Dave Horsfall 0 siblings, 0 replies; 29+ messages in thread From: Dave Horsfall @ 2024-06-04 4:26 UTC (permalink / raw) To: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 492 bytes --] 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 ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 29+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] Re: Proliferation of book print styles 2024-06-02 12:39 ` Douglas McIlroy ` (2 preceding siblings ...) 2024-06-02 14:31 ` Al Kossow @ 2024-06-02 14:48 ` Stuff Received 2024-06-02 17:44 ` Ralph Corderoy 2024-06-02 15:21 ` Michael Kjörling 2024-06-04 13:22 ` Marc Donner 5 siblings, 1 reply; 29+ messages in thread From: Stuff Received @ 2024-06-02 14:48 UTC (permalink / raw) To: tuhs 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. ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 29+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] Re: Proliferation of book print styles 2024-06-02 14:48 ` Stuff Received @ 2024-06-02 17:44 ` Ralph Corderoy 0 siblings, 0 replies; 29+ messages in thread From: Ralph Corderoy @ 2024-06-02 17:44 UTC (permalink / raw) To: tuhs 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. ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 29+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] Re: Proliferation of book print styles 2024-06-02 12:39 ` Douglas McIlroy ` (3 preceding siblings ...) 2024-06-02 14:48 ` Stuff Received @ 2024-06-02 15:21 ` Michael Kjörling 2024-06-02 20:22 ` Åke Nordin 2024-06-04 13:22 ` Marc Donner 5 siblings, 1 reply; 29+ messages in thread From: Michael Kjörling @ 2024-06-02 15:21 UTC (permalink / raw) To: tuhs 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?” ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 29+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] Re: Proliferation of book print styles 2024-06-02 15:21 ` Michael Kjörling @ 2024-06-02 20:22 ` Åke Nordin 0 siblings, 0 replies; 29+ messages in thread From: Åke Nordin @ 2024-06-02 20:22 UTC (permalink / raw) To: tuhs 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# ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 29+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] Re: Proliferation of book print styles 2024-06-02 12:39 ` Douglas McIlroy ` (4 preceding siblings ...) 2024-06-02 15:21 ` Michael Kjörling @ 2024-06-04 13:22 ` Marc Donner 2024-06-04 14:15 ` Larry McVoy ` (3 more replies) 5 siblings, 4 replies; 29+ messages in thread From: Marc Donner @ 2024-06-04 13:22 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Douglas McIlroy; +Cc: TUHS main list [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 3858 bytes --] 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 > [-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 6271 bytes --] ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 29+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] Re: Proliferation of book print styles 2024-06-04 13:22 ` Marc Donner @ 2024-06-04 14:15 ` Larry McVoy 2024-06-04 14:48 ` Ralph Corderoy ` (2 subsequent siblings) 3 siblings, 0 replies; 29+ messages in thread From: Larry McVoy @ 2024-06-04 14:15 UTC (permalink / raw) To: TUHS main list 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); } } ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 29+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] Re: Proliferation of book print styles 2024-06-04 13:22 ` Marc Donner 2024-06-04 14:15 ` Larry McVoy @ 2024-06-04 14:48 ` Ralph Corderoy 2024-06-04 14:53 ` Warner Losh 2024-06-04 21:46 ` Adam Thornton 3 siblings, 0 replies; 29+ messages in thread From: Ralph Corderoy @ 2024-06-04 14:48 UTC (permalink / raw) To: TUHS main list 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. ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 29+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] Re: Proliferation of book print styles 2024-06-04 13:22 ` Marc Donner 2024-06-04 14:15 ` Larry McVoy 2024-06-04 14:48 ` Ralph Corderoy @ 2024-06-04 14:53 ` Warner Losh 2024-06-04 15:29 ` Grant Taylor via TUHS ` (2 more replies) 2024-06-04 21:46 ` Adam Thornton 3 siblings, 3 replies; 29+ messages in thread From: Warner Losh @ 2024-06-04 14:53 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Marc Donner; +Cc: Douglas McIlroy, TUHS main list [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 4610 bytes --] 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 >> > [-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 7248 bytes --] ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 29+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] Re: Proliferation of book print styles 2024-06-04 14:53 ` Warner Losh @ 2024-06-04 15:29 ` Grant Taylor via TUHS 2024-06-05 0:13 ` Alexis 2024-06-07 7:32 ` arnold 2 siblings, 0 replies; 29+ messages in thread From: Grant Taylor via TUHS @ 2024-06-04 15:29 UTC (permalink / raw) To: 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 ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 29+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] Re: Proliferation of book print styles 2024-06-04 14:53 ` Warner Losh 2024-06-04 15:29 ` Grant Taylor via TUHS @ 2024-06-05 0:13 ` Alexis 2024-06-07 7:32 ` arnold 2 siblings, 0 replies; 29+ messages in thread From: Alexis @ 2024-06-05 0:13 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Warner Losh; +Cc: The Unix Heritage Society 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. ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 29+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] Re: Proliferation of book print styles 2024-06-04 14:53 ` Warner Losh 2024-06-04 15:29 ` Grant Taylor via TUHS 2024-06-05 0:13 ` Alexis @ 2024-06-07 7:32 ` arnold 2 siblings, 0 replies; 29+ messages in thread From: arnold @ 2024-06-07 7:32 UTC (permalink / raw) To: marc.donner, imp; +Cc: tuhs, douglas.mcilroy 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 ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 29+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] Re: Proliferation of book print styles 2024-06-04 13:22 ` Marc Donner ` (2 preceding siblings ...) 2024-06-04 14:53 ` Warner Losh @ 2024-06-04 21:46 ` Adam Thornton 3 siblings, 0 replies; 29+ messages in thread From: Adam Thornton @ 2024-06-04 21:46 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Marc Donner, The Eunuchs Hysterical Society [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 652 bytes --] 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 [-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 1144 bytes --] ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 29+ messages in thread
end of thread, other threads:[~2024-06-07 7:58 UTC | newest] Thread overview: 29+ messages (download: mbox.gz / follow: Atom feed) -- links below jump to the message on this page -- 2024-06-02 2:31 [TUHS] Proliferation of book print styles Will Senn 2024-06-02 2:44 ` [TUHS] " Peter Yardley 2024-06-03 21:42 ` James Frew 2024-06-04 5:49 ` Dave Horsfall 2024-06-04 22:54 ` Dave Horsfall 2024-06-07 7:58 ` Peter Yardley 2024-06-02 4:03 ` Kevin Bowling 2024-06-02 8:08 ` Marc Rochkind 2024-06-02 13:50 ` Will Senn 2024-06-02 21:21 ` Kevin Bowling 2024-06-02 13:13 ` Will Senn 2024-06-02 12:39 ` Douglas McIlroy 2024-06-02 12:45 ` arnold 2024-06-02 12:55 ` Will Senn 2024-06-02 14:31 ` Al Kossow 2024-06-03 9:53 ` Ralph Corderoy 2024-06-04 4:26 ` Dave Horsfall 2024-06-02 14:48 ` Stuff Received 2024-06-02 17:44 ` Ralph Corderoy 2024-06-02 15:21 ` Michael Kjörling 2024-06-02 20:22 ` Åke Nordin 2024-06-04 13:22 ` Marc Donner 2024-06-04 14:15 ` Larry McVoy 2024-06-04 14:48 ` Ralph Corderoy 2024-06-04 14:53 ` Warner Losh 2024-06-04 15:29 ` Grant Taylor via TUHS 2024-06-05 0:13 ` Alexis 2024-06-07 7:32 ` arnold 2024-06-04 21:46 ` Adam Thornton
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