Re: Bibliography & ToC placement

[Paul Prescod]

address@hidden wrote:
> 
> Sure would be nice to have a WYSIWYG editor for someone like my wife that
> stored in lout format.

What you want is a word processor that *works*. Word's file format has
almost nothing to do with its problems nad I think that lout format
would actually be a step backwards. Working with a programmable format
in a WYSIWYG editor would be more prone to bugs and crashing than
working with the (mostly) non-programmable formats that Word accepts.

http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/html-spec/html-essay.html

"My experience with document interchange led me to classify document
formats using the essential distinction that some are "programmable" and
some are not. Most widely used source forms are programmable: TeX,
troff, postscript, and the like. On the other hand, there are several
"static" formats: plain text, Microsoft RTF, FrameMaker MIF, GNU's
TeXinfo.

The reason that this distinction is essential with respect to document
interchange is that extracting information from documents in
"programmable" document formats is equivalent to the halting problem.
That is, it is arbitrarily difficult and cannot be automated in a
general fashion. 

For example, I conjecture that it is impossible to write a program that
will extract the third word from a TeX document. It would be an easy
task for 80% of the TeX documents out there -- just skip over some
formatting stuff and grab the third bunch of characters surrounded by
whitespace. But that "formatting stuff" might be a program that
generates 100 words from the hypenation dictionary. So the simple
lexical scan of the TeX source would find a word that is not third word
of the document when printed. 

This may seem like an obscure and unimportant problem, but I assure you
that the problem of converting TeX tables to FrameMaker MIF is just as
unsolvable.

So while "programmable" document formats have the advantage that
features can be added on a per-document basis, they suffer the
disadvantage that these features cannot be recovered by the machine and
translated in an automated fashion. "

-- 
 Paul Prescod  - http://itrc.uwaterloo.ca/~papresco

The United Nations Declaration of Human Rights will be 50 years old on
December 10, 1998. These are your fundamental rights:
http://www.udhr.org/history/default.htm