Re: Thanks for your help

joseph harris wrote:

> Lee,
> 
> Thank you for a most informative and valuable description. Though I lack 
> the $300 fee to offer ;-), can I ask two questions.

The offer was really tongue in cheek. Learning HTML is so simple 
(really, it is) that I figure that anyone who is unwilling to do so 
deserves to pay through the nose for conversion services. :-)

> First, how close is rtf to html [it does remove the need to know html at 
> all, but I'm not certain technically of its closeness]?

It's kind of like the difference between an apple and an orange; you can 
make a tart from either of them, but they have to be handled very 
differently.

In XHTML (the XML variant of HTML) you have opening tags and closing 
tags. Everything between them is classified according to the nature of 
the tag. For example, in HTML if you were to see:

<div>
<h3>Introductory Note</h3>
<p>BENJAMIN FRANKLIN was born in Milk Street, Boston, ... </p>
<p>Meantime Franklin was concerning himself more and ... </p>
</div>

you would know that the phrase "Introductory Note" is a level-three 
header (title), followed by a paragraph, both of which make up a 
discrete division of the text.

What you wouldn't know is how level-three headers should be painted on 
the end user's screen. Should it be centered? In a larger font? Bold 
face? An alternate font? You also don't know whether the paragraphs 
should be double-spaced or not, or indented or not.

BUT...

As an author or editor, you don't need to know anything about how these 
elements will be drawn. Seriously. Give it up. Trust that the software 
which is doing the actual drawing knows what it's doing. You have no 
hope of figuring out what the final "canvas" will be, so just quit 
trying to force your customers to share your aesthetics.

RTF (Rich Text Format is composed of groups delimited by curly braces. 
Each group can contains unformatted text, "control words", "control 
symbols", and other groups. Generally, control words affect the 
formatting of everything inside the group.

The above snippet from Benjamin Franklin's Biography would look like 
this (highly edited) in RTF:

{\rtf1\ansi\ansicpg1252\deff0\deflang1033
\viewkind4\uc1\pard\f0\fs20\par
\pard\qc\fs28 Introductory Note\par
\pard\fs20\par
\tab BENJAMIN FRANKLIN was born in Milk Street, Boston, ....
\par \tab Meantime Franklin was concerning himself more and ...
}

Now we know that this snippet is formatted using the first version of 
RTF, and is encoded in the Windows 1252 encoding. The control word 
"\par" means start a new paragraph with the formatting of the previous 
paragraph. "\pard\qc\fs28" means "reset to the default paragraph 
properties, add paragraph centering, and use a font size of 28." At the 
end of "Introductory note" we will start a new paragraph, reset the 
properties (no more centering) and set the font size to 20. We then move 
to the first tab stop before writing text. At some arbitrary point we 
start a new paragraph, move to the first tab stop and continue drawing 
text, continuing thusly to the end of the document.

At this point we have a pretty good idea of how the document looked in 
your editor, and have a pretty good idea of how the document will look 
if it is printed. However, we don't know anything about the editorial 
components of this document. We are lead to believe that the phrase 
"Introductory Note" starts a paragraph, and that the sentence starting 
"Meantime Franklin was concerning himself" also starts a paragraph. 
Because you and I both know that this is not true, we can only conclude 
the the "\par" control word does not represent the beginning of a 
paragraph, but only a certain presentation that we typically associate 
with paragraphs.

So suppose an end user wants a "full-block" presentation of the document 
(don't try to make the user justify his or her preferences--just accept 
them). In the full block style all headers are left justified, 
paragraphs are not indented, and each paragraph is separated by an empty 
line (this is the default style for most web browsers). If I were 
responsible for algorithmically converting this RTF snippet to block 
style, how would I figure out which "paragraphs" are headers and which 
are really centered paragraphs? How can I distinguish between real 
paragraphs and some text that kind of resembles a paragraph but isn't? 
(There are, of course, heuristics I could use, but there is also a 
margin of error.)

RTF suffers from much of the same drawback as PDF: it was designed to 
draw a well-defined image to a canvas of fixed parameters. The markup 
language is designed to define a single, fixed instance of a document 
and an RTF document cannot be readily be modified to fit the needs of a 
different device or user, except by a human being.

Now, one of the drawbacks to HTML is that as it has evolved it has moved 
from a presentational orientation to a semantic one. The semantic 
orientation is the one we want, but the presentational orientation 
remains for backwards compatibility. When you convert RTF to HTML it 
will preserve the presentation aspects of the RTF but will not, and 
cannot, imply the semantic aspects of HTML. You end up with HTML that is 
purely presentational in orientation and captures but a single instance 
of the document. It does not have the flexibility that is otherwise 
HTML's greatest strength.

So while you can convert RTF to HTML, it really doesn't obviate the need 
to actually learn the fundamentals of HTML. You can use HTML converted 
from RTF as input to a number of e-book creation programs, but you will 
likely be disappointed with the results. A WYSIWYG editor is not what 
you want, because while You Will Get What You See, you will /only/ get 
What You See, and not what you probably really want, which is a document 
which will look good no matter where it's deployed.

My opinion is that if you want to create the best e-books possible you 
must learn the fundamentals of HTML. There are no shortcuts (although 
you don't need to become an HTML guru, with all the arcane knowledge of 
its quirks to be effective).

Personally, to develop HTML I use the Microsoft Visual Studio HTML 
editor. It has a "design" tab that shows a default presentation of the 
HTML, a "source" tab that shows the actual HTML. It also has a "cookie 
crumb" trail at the bottom that tracks the position of the cursor in the 
DOM tree.

Believe it or not, Microsoft Word can actually be used to build correct 
HTML, if you're careful and you understand the structure of HTML. What 
you do is create styles to mimic HTML tags, and then you use those 
styles religiously. But you must understand the fundamentals of HTML to 
make this work.

> Second, would you like to put this up somewhere [in html naturally] so I 
> - and others - can recommend it where appropriate?

While I am flattered by the suggestion, for the time being, you're going 
to have to rely on the Yahoo groups archive. As with most things there 
are time trade-offs, and blogging (which is essentially what that would 
be) is not high on my list of priorities. I am going to try to put 
together some soft of document that explains how to use MS Word, as 
alluded to above, and when I do I'll try to find some other blogger (Mr. 
Rothman?) to post it for me.



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