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