xml-dev - Re: The problem with typography (with or without flow objects)

[Marcus Carr <mrc@allette.com.au>]

Sebastian Rahtz wrote:

> no, the human inserts them in the source. we ran the book, viewed the
> pages, and corrected the bad breaks with PIs in the XML file, and
> reran the formatting.

So if you wanted to use a different FO application to render that book, you would
likely have to go back to the source document and redo your page breaks, right?
If the two applications used different hyphenation dictionaries, there is a
distinct possibility that the page breaks would change in a 300 page book.
Restricting the formatting abstraction to the FO layer has failed - aspects of
format have crept straight past it and back into the source data. (Please don't
take this as criticism of your approach Sebastian - it's pragmatic and effective
and under the circumstances, I would likely have done the same sort of thing.)
The point is, rendering is and will remain specific to the application, so the
syntax behind it will have limited impact on the end product. I accept that there
are benefits in everyone using the same terminology, but I believe that FOs are
intended to fulfill a much bigger role than that. My understanding is that
they're supposed to "free us from the shackles of formatting applications", but
I've yet to be convinced that they can deliver this.


--
Regards,

Marcus Carr                      email:  mrc@allette.com.au
___________________________________________________________________
Allette Systems (Australia)      www:    http://www.allette.com.au
___________________________________________________________________
"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler."
       - Einstein



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