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My biggest kvetch about all the structured doc tools I've seen (and I've been using them as far back as IBM's "BookMaster") is that they generally output like sausage machines.
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All the text is simply extruded onto the page, with no awareness of how people read documents or process information.
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It is true that s
<span style="font-size: 9pt;">ome output processors/digesters can be "instructed" on how to handle things such as widows and orphans, and even some semi-intelligent hyphenation. But none of them (in my experience) produce layouts anywhere as near good as what even a moderately-educated human can do. (kerning, leading, knowing what chunks need to stay together to be useful, etc. )</span>
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<span style="font-size: 9pt;"> </span>
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<span style="font-size: 9pt;">Their output is "OK" for very small chunk information like help pages, but dreadful for any document that requires more than that. </span>
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<span style="font-size: 9pt;">I'm not completely opposed to them; using such tools</span>
<span style="font-size: 9pt;"> helps writing teams standardize things --- and DITA (as a philosophy of information organization) does help rationalize what can otherwise be messy organization. And they can help with reuse (but not as much as you might think, once you start factoring in the overhead of finding the resuable chunks, and then writing around them so that they don't read like an undigested lump in the middle of your prose!)</span>
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<span style="font-size: 9pt;"> </span>
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<span style="font-size: 9pt;">Grant</span>
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<br/>> On October 29, 2013 at 9:30 AM Rick Quatro <rick@rickquatro.com> wrote:
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<br/>> Mike's comment is interesting light of the fact that many people are moving away from WSIWYG "in this century." The whole XML-authoring world, with DITA, S1000D, DocBook, etc., is a move away from WSIWYG authoring tools. Increasingly, authoring content is being separated from rendering it for output (for example, with applications like Flare). In a sense, we are going full circle back to the division of labor that existing in the typesetting era. That is why there may be a revival in the LaTex world: it has always separated authoring and rendering.
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<br/>> Rick Quatro
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<br/>> ➢ Isn't LaTex a non-WYSIWYG application, though? I can't imagine working that way in this century. I don't think I've done that since Wordstar. :)
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<br/>> ➢ Mike Wickham
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