Re: Generating PDFs with Ada

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

Le Sun, 16 Jan 2011 16:33:25 +0100, Simon Wright <simon@pushface.org> a  
écrit:
>> A hierarchy of text segments (chapter, paragraph etc) is a possible  
>> view of
>> the document, of which importance is quite minor and becoming more and  
>> more
>> negligible, because documents are never read sequentially. Document is  
>> not
>> a fiction novel. The structure of pages is also a view, a harmful view,
>> because pages have nothing to do either with the content or with the
>> rendering on the display.
>
> Well, you've lost me there. If you had to write something on networking
> issues (I say 'something' because if you're going to chuck out book,
> chapter, paragraph etc you might as well go the whole hog and chuck out
> document too :) how would you structure it?
Pascal or Ludovic introduced DITA in this topic. May be he would like this  
one ;) This one use multiple part to be later merged together (the merge  
may be done in multiple way, simultaneously), while DocBook create a  
monolithic document the first time.

I suppose what Dmitry was to notice, has more to deal with *premature  
formating*, just like there is premature optmization, than with Book and  
Page used as paradigm to talk about the structure of a document.

What to use depends on the area. Think about a software design, you have  
comments in the source, some documentation fragment on the topic of the  
application and its area. How could you create a single document from this  
? There is no way. You would better consider all of these to be standalone  
document fragments, then do an assemblage of these fragments targeting  
users, another targeting the maintainers, another targeting document used  
to promote the application, and so on.

Obviously, you need something common to these fragment, something which  
make these to know about each other when required and be able to merged  
these together, to know what kind of fragment is this, how it relate to  
other. That is what DITA is for (and RDF may be useful too here).

Now think about some movie review, there is less something like  
independent fragments here, and you may prefer DocBook instead (DITA is  
likely to be useless at all here).

Note 1: DITA may produce DocBook, these are not opposite.
Note 2: I said DITA and DocBook, while this may be any other systems of  
conventions with the same functionalities (as an example, DocBook is known  
to be too much for some applications, the same about DITA).


-- 
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