Re: Re. Doing online docs and printed books simultaneously

[Alexander von Obert <a -dot- v -dot- obert -at- MSN -dot- SUB -dot- ORG>]

Hello,

geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca wrote:

>     Let's start with a standard, well-accepted premise: The online medium
>     and the printed medium are sufficiently different that you must design
>     your information differently for both, resulting in a fair bit of
>     duplicated effort. For example: a typical 7X9 inch user manual won't
>     fit well on a typical small computer screen, so the page layout must
>     differ; fine graphic details are lost at 72 dpi (computer screen)
>     resolution, so graphics must differ; blind references such as "see
>     above" don't work online, although they can work well on paper; and so
>     on, for at least several pages.

If you are looking for a solution, you might consider a more abstract
approach like SGML:

- You don4t do page layout or other output-specific formating anymore.
- Instead, you tag the elements on a more abstract level:
  (heading, subheading, table heading, introduction for paper version,
  advance organizer for hypertext, start of list [may be in a list,
  which implies a sublist]...)
- Output formating is done with a totally different tool than your
  SGML editor and is done separately for every output medium.
  THIS is the place to consider picture resolution, how to represent
  some kind of heading or body text, what part of the document
  and so on.
- SGML is a pure ASCII format with many properties, whis lead
  themselves to database publishing - a thin you cannot avoid
  in big hypertext projects.

Further discussions can be found in SGML newsgroups and mailing lists,
so I don4t want to go to deeper detail here.


Greetings from Germany,
Alexander