[LINK] RFI: Cross-Media Publishing under Linux/OO
Roger Clarke
Roger.Clarke at xamax.com.au
Thu Aug 4 20:57:44 AEST 2011
At 21:32 +1200 4/8/11, Paul Bolger wrote:
>I'm interested in reading more about your gripes with Apple as I'm
>wondering whether to head that direction next time I buy a machine.
OSX was a 'real' OS, Unix-with-a-skin. A real OSX enables
applications, and users with high-level privileges, to access the
power of the device.
IOS is designed to provide the supplier of the OS with power over
users' devices, and to cut users off from the power of the device.
The Mac division of Apple no longer swings lead. Macs are on their
way towards being an appliance like the iPhone and the iPad. Put
crudely, OSX's future versions will look less and less like Unix
[which, even after all this time, is not *entirely* a bad thing], but
more and more like IOS.
My next machine will be dual-boot, transitioning away from OSX to Linux.
Assuming I live long enough to worry about such things, the one after
that will be whatever has survived the OS holocaust and succeeds
Linux.
Following down one of my nightmare scenarios, those of us saying such
things, and using such software, may be hiding under logs more often
than just on Census night, talking with fewer people, using multiple
identities more assiduously, and encrypting a lot more of our
message- and web-traffic.
>I must admit that Final Cut Pro has a lot to do with that though -
>there is really nothing on Linux that equals it, and the win
>alternative is Avid, which appears to be becoming a dinosaur. I
>suspect if I did go Mac I would probably be dual booting with Ubuntu
>though.
Well, the old rule was 'if your primary need is defined by software,
go with the OS that runs it, or runs it significantly better'.
For (heck, what was that brilliant flight simulation package
again??), it was current or at least very recent Windows; for most
publishing software (and [declaration of bias] a squillion other
things, it was current or at least very recent Mac OS.
So your strategy looks pretty good to me, i.e. dual-boot, although
maybe medium-to-long-term rather than transitional.
>Regarding your docs problem: have you looked at Lyx? It's a wysiwyg
>LaTEX editor which produces rather nice looking PDFs or which can also
>produce html. It can also produce Docbook, and has internal support
>for Subversion. It's designed to be used for academic and scientific
>writing. The only real drawback is that the templating learning curve
>is steep.
'Help, I'm stuck in a time-warp'.
As a consultant, I have to read, modify (incl. revision-markings) and
write MS-Office formats. As a still pretty frequent publisher in the
academic literatures (sometimes IEEE and other technical, but mainly
business, social sciences and law), I have much the same need. Heck,
lots of conferences are still adjusting to the idea of using .dot
formats to get authors to use pre-specified style-sheets.
So (after quickly checking Docbook for the first time in a long
while), and thinking back over the troff, runoff, teX history, nope,
I don't think they're going to solve my problem. Which is a little
sad, but you have to live in the world you live in.
Oooh, philosophy. Tony Barry would approve of that.
(Now let's see whether he's listening in).
______________________________________________
>On 4 August 2011 13:25, Roger Clarke <Roger.Clarke at xamax.com.au> wrote:
>> Since 1994, I've been preparing documents in Word that can be used to
>> produce both printed/PDF'd format and web-pages.
>>
>> I'm looking at a 2-year plan to escape from the increasingly
>> manipulative Apple world (where I've been since April 1984) to Linux
>> and hence OO.
>>
>> (The idea is to buy a pre-IOS Mac, dual-bootable with Linux -
>> although I'm not at all sure which distro yet - and migrate from OSX
>> to Linux over a couple of years. Replacing MYOB may prove to be one
>> of the challenges:
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Linux_accounting_software ).
>>
>> But I can't see how to replicate my convenient publishing environment!?
>> (I'm looking for a *functional* equivalent. I can learn new habits).
>>
>> OO save-as HTML is far too primitive of course.
>>
>> The key requirements are:
>> - headers and footers, incl. parameter-setting
>> - hotlinks, anchors and own-HTML insertions
>>
>> Details are below.
>>
>> The Link Institute's thoughts on how to do it will be much appreciated!
>>
>> ________________________________________________________________________
>>
>> I produce my web-pages in the following way:
>> - in MS Word 5.1a (1992 - not just unintrusive but very usable)
>> - making disciplined use of a set of styles that map readily
>> to HTML layout (not CSS of course - this was 1994!)
>> - with a couple of formatting tricks, described below
>> - save-as RTF (v.1.0)
>> - run it through rtf2html 2.7.5 (also 1992 vintage)
>> - convert any images to jpg
>> - use an editor to clear a couple of HTML format-gremlins that arise
>>
>> Primitive-but-very-usable markup facilities enable the inclusion of:
>> - hotlinks in double-underlining
>> - URLs in front of the hotlinks, in double-underlining and hidden
>> - anchors in bold, outline and hidden
>> - paragraphs pre-coded in HTML format, using a style called HTML,
>> which is hidden, and is simply carried over into the output ...
>> - ... and enables HTML headers and footers, including PHP calls,
>> at the beginning and end of the document - key content below
>>
>> To produce a version for printing or PDF, I need to hide all 'hidden'
>> text, and remove all double-underlining (although I usually do a bit
>> of prettying up as well).
>>
>> The current template is at:
>> http://www.rogerclarke.com/II/Web-Paper-Template.mw5
>>
>> The current style-sheet definitions are in a .txt file at
>> http://www.rogerclarke.com/II/html-trans
>>
>> A recent document that exercises most of the features (but not all of
>> the styles) is:
>> http://www.rogerclarke.com/II/Passwords.html
>>
>> The .rtf file that gave rise to it is at
>> http://www.rogerclarke.com/II/Passwords.rtf.
>> (The .rtf versions are normally stored on my machine, not uploaded to
>> the web-server).
>>
>> _________________________________________________________________________
>>
>> The key header-content is:
>>
>> <?php include("pathname.txt"); ?>
>> <?php include($home_directory."/Library/stylescall.php"); ?>
>> <?php include($home_directory."/Library/header_publicns.txt"); ?>
>> <title>Roger Clarke's 'TITLE'</title>
>>
>>
>> The key footer-content is:
>>
>> <?php $created = 'DATE'; ?>
>> <?php $lastperson='Roger Clarke'; ?>
>> <?php $lastamended = 'DATE'; ?>
>> <?php $footertext = $_SERVER['PHP_SELF']; ?>
>> <?php include($home_directory."/Library/prelimfooter_publicns.txt"); ?>
>> <?php include($home_directory."/Library/sponsorshipfooter.txt"); ?>
>> <?php include($home_directory."/Library/adminfooter.txt"); ?>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Roger Clarke http://www.rogerclarke.com/
>>
>> Xamax Consultancy Pty Ltd 78 Sidaway St, Chapman ACT 2611 AUSTRALIA
>> Tel: +61 2 6288 1472, and 6288 6916
>> mailto:Roger.Clarke at xamax.com.au http://www.xamax.com.au/
>>
>> Visiting Professor in the Cyberspace Law & Policy Centre Uni of NSW
>> Visiting Professor in Computer Science Australian National University
>> _______________________________________________
>> Link mailing list
>> Link at mailman.anu.edu.au
>> http://mailman.anu.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/link
>>
--
Roger Clarke http://www.rogerclarke.com/
Xamax Consultancy Pty Ltd 78 Sidaway St, Chapman ACT 2611 AUSTRALIA
Tel: +61 2 6288 1472, and 6288 6916
mailto:Roger.Clarke at xamax.com.au http://www.xamax.com.au/
Visiting Professor in the Cyberspace Law & Policy Centre Uni of NSW
Visiting Professor in Computer Science Australian National University
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