RE: [Groff] Groff editor.

[Karee, Srinivas]

I care about the font/bold/italics as this is a document which will be
sent to the customer and we cannot afford to send a plain text document
to customers. Today we are sending a formatted document with all bold
headings (multiple subsections), italic content and use different fonts.
I cannot convert it to plain-text. 

-----Original Message-----
From: Nick Stoughton [mailto:address@hidden 
Sent: Monday, August 20, 2007 3:35 PM
To: Karee, Srinivas
Cc: Meg McRoberts; Clarke Echols; address@hidden
Subject: RE: [Groff] Groff editor.

On Mon, 2007-08-20 at 14:11 -0400, Karee, Srinivas wrote:
> Basically I cannot lose bold/italic/font and other stuff.

The issue here for me is about the "meta-information". I have a 4,000
page document that describes programming APIs. The fact that a function
name is in italics with () after it is of much less importance to me
than the fact that I'm talking about a function here, which is something
that will appear in the index, etc etc. And when I describe a symbolic
constant, it comes out in ALL CAPS and in Courier-Roman font, but as far
as I'm concerned, I'm just describing a constant. I don't care what it
looks like until the very last moment when it gets rendered for the
reader.

This is one of the things I hate about WYSIWYG editors ... it is all
about the rendering, and not about the content.

Both groff and docbook-XML give me this level of abstraction when I'm
dealing with the source of a document. Word does not. 

So, my real question, I guess, is do you care only about the
bold/italic/font information, or do you care about the meaning (and
possible other side effects, such as indexing)  behind the font?
-- 
Nick Stoughton <address@hidden>
USENIX