Technogology issues aside, the subject line is by far the most
interesting I've noticed in the past couple of years.  With a title like
that, you could write a book on just about anything and make the
best-seller list.
Bill Wagner
 
 
Tim Bray wrote:
>
> 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