I'm With Tim Bray on this one. I used to use TeX to do mathematical
typesetting for electrotechnical journals, and the power and versatility of
TeX are amazing. There are probably GUIs out there now that will sit nicely
on a TeX file for those that need 'em, but we used to throw ours out and key
in the TeX code on a command line, because once you got the hang of TeX it
was easier and faster to do it that way. TeX was a bit of a bear for us
English-Major editorial types to learn, but I began to appreciate the logic
of it. For producing a book with complex typesetting, such as math or
20th-Century poetry, TeX is still strong.
 
There are a few drawbacks to using HTML. The HTML standards are complete
enough to do a decent "browseable" file, but the browsers don't really
adhere to them very well. Netscape et al. stumble on some basic typographic
elements, like open and close quotes, en and em dashes, precise spacings,
etc. If you make a simple file with these things in it and then take a  look
at it with different browsers, the variations are suprising. The different
fonts available on different people's computers throw in yet another
difficulty. The easy way out is to typeset the text and then just scan it as
an image--but this makes every page a large and slow-to-download artifact,
and makes it unsearchable. HTML is much faster for World-Wide Web purposes.
 
Chris Booth
 
> ----------
> From:         Tim Bray
> Reply To:     Ezra Pound discussion list of the University of Maine
> Sent:         Tuesday, October 26, 1999 12:33 PM
> To:   [log in to unmask]
> Subject:      Hot bricks, text formatting, and the silence of the poet
>
> At 10:24 AM 10/26/99 +0100, Martin Deporres wrote:
> >TEX and TROFF? I suppose you use a hot brick to warm your bed. I know
> >someone who thinks MS-DOS is making a comeback--you and he would probably
> >have a lot to talk about.
> >
> >Try the Adobe Portable Document Format. PDFs are completely portable,
> font
> >embeddable and totally transparent on any platform--Windows, Unix,
> Macintosh.
> >The document reader is free from the Adobe website, the documents can be
> >opened online or downloaded to print on any printer of remotely recent
> >vintage.
>
> As a computer geek specializing in publishing technology, I am mild and
> circumspect in my remarks around the higher peaks of textual analysis and
> literary theory, but now you stompin' on my turf, sonny.
>
> Your remarks are technically illiterate.  PDF is a way of capturing the
> *output* of a typesetting program; that output can be from anything,
> including the elderly programs I mentioned, word processors, high-end
> page composers, you name it.  PDF has the grievous disadvantages that
> it is proprietary to a single vendor, that it offers poor support for
> full-text search, that unless you're a real virtuoso it produces very
> large
> files, and that its viewer has irritatingly nonstandard behavior in
> response
> to obvious things such as page up/down and arrow up/down.  If you want to
> print something and take it home, PDF is OK, the letters really stand
> for "Print the Damn File".  If you want to view something online, PDF is
> a fourth-rate solution.  Furthermore, even if it were a good idea to
> read poetry in PDF (it's not), this leaves unsolved the problem of how
> you actually do the formatting and produce the PDF.
>
> The *right* way to deliver electronic texts online is with HTML - as
> evidenced by the 100 million or so internet users who have voted with
> their feet.  It is compact, non-proprietary, highly searchable, and
> demonstrably easy and pleasant to use.
>
> My contention was that it just *might* be possible to do a fair rendition
> of the Cantos at the bleeding edge of HTML, but you'd really need to know
> what Pound actually cared about.  E.g. sometimes long lines are wrapped at
> the right in a weird way - is this essential to the correct presentation
> in the mind of the poet?  Also on some lines it seems that the inter-word
> spaces are oddly variable in size, but I suspect that these are at least
> occasionally artifacts of the typesetting process.  How would one find out
> what is important and what isn't?  The poet has to be the judge but he's
> not here to help us; did he leave instructions?
>
> And by the way, Mr. Deporres: I guarantee that I could, with TeX or troff,
> produce a rendition of the Cantos that you would be unable to distinguish
> from the original.  I challenge you to come close with a commercial word
> processor, but advise you against the (considerable) waste of time and
> effort.  A high-end typesetting system such as Frame could do it, but
> would
> require a hellish expenditure of work.  In particular, TeX is still used
> for essentially all the world's serious mathematical typesetting, because
> math has demanding requirements that are amusingly similar in some
> respects
> to those of verse.
>
> And a hot brick warms a cold bed just fine, dammit.
>
> Back to our regularly-scheduled literary discourse.
>
> But I repeat my question: I've read a whole lot in this area, but never
> run across a word about the mechanics of the preparation of the text of
> the Cantos... does anyone here know? -Tim
>