Re: Generating PDFs with Ada

["Yannick Duchêne (Hibou57)" <yannick_duchene@yahoo.fr>]

Le Tue, 11 Jan 2011 23:14:12 +0100, Ludovic Brenta  
<ludovic@ludovic-brenta.org> a écrit:
> * separation of form from content (documents should not contain the
>   definition of styles; they should point to shared style sheets).
>
> * compatibility with multiple (current and future) professional version
>   control systems providing the ability to branch, merge and tag
>   versioned documents and versioned style sheets by multiple people at
>   the same time; the only format which in my experience has this
>   property is Plain Text, possibly with markup!
>
> * compatibility with multiple (current and future) editors and viewers
>   on multiple (current and future) platforms; think of legal
>   requirements that documents be readable 100 years from now, and the
>   fact that the only extant documents that have proven to have this
>   property are on paper, parchment or papyrus.
>
> * compatibility with search and indexing software.
>
> * compatibility with cryptographic signatures, for authentication of
>   documents
>
> * compatibility with multiple encryption algorithms, current and future,
>   for secrecy.

You must enjoy markup languages a lot so (XML, HTML, and the like).

> I don't use office software much, I don't use Windows, and I would

Neither I am, I feel this is too much presentation-oriented (and not  
enough semantic-oriented, as you noted). Moreover, these presentation  
oriented tools are more resource (hardware resources) and time (user time)  
consuming than what semantic-oriented editing is.

But this is still the major case: people use office applications and want  
to use office applications. Presentation can be as a support of  
expression, and in the presentation area, MS Office is one of the most  
well know and used.

Personal note: if you really want presentation and ease of creation and  
use and resilience, HTML+CSS (+SVG, optionally) is really the best. It  
happens sometime I wonder why people use so many different heavy formats  
while there is such a powerful and simple single one (and it can even be  
made dynamic for user interaction).

-- 
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les chiens.

“I am fluent in ASCII” [Warren 2010]