Re: cl-who, another html templating system

Matthew Danish <[email protected]> writes:

> On Fri, Jul 18, 2003 at 12:20:10PM -0700, Peter Seibel wrote:
> > Right now it's pretty much a big kludge, using carefully ordered
> > regexps to apply formatting but at some point I'm going to have to
> > start sending Word documents to my publisher--at that point I'm either
> > going to have to soup it up to make it capable of generating RTF
> > documents or switch to Word. :-(
> 
> What kind of publisher expects Word documents? The things don't even
> show up the same way from reboot to reboot. I'm highly suspect of
> this fellow.

The kind of publisher who has a bunch of editors (i.e. people, not
software) who are comfortable with the workflow they've developed
using Word and its revision history and notes features. When it's
finally time to publish they convert the Word file to some typesetting
program (Quark or Pagemaker probably) where they do all the final
beautifying. While I'm no big fan of Word (obviously, that's why I'm
in the mess I'm in) I can how much of the publisher's problem is a
workflow problem, not a page layout problem. Word provides them with
some features they can cobble together with some filenaming practices
into a system that works for them and it's probably a lot cheaper and
easier to deploy to their authors than a serious document workflow
system. (Also, a lot of their books are on Windows-related topics; the
authors who wrote those were probably more comfortable with Word than
TeX.)

ObLisp: If it were further along in development, I might try using
Alpaca[1], an editor written for OS X using (and embedding) OpenMCL
which is designed for authors of books but with Emacs-style
extensibility using Common Lisp instead of elisp. Has anyone else
played around with it?

-Peter

[1] <http://alpaca.sourceforge.net/>

-- 
Peter Seibel                                      [email protected]

         Lisp is the red pill. -- John Fraser, comp.lang.lisp