Jon
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Jon Bosak, Novell Corporate Publishing Services jb@novell.com
2180 Fortune Drive, San Jose, CA 95131 Fax: 408 577 5020
A sponsor of the Davenport Group (ftp://ftp.ora.com/pub/davenport/)
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The Library is a sphere whose consummate center is any hexagon, and
whose circumference is inaccessible. -- Jorge Luis Borges
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Date: Thu, 24 Nov 94 19:46:54 -0700
From: Paul Burchard <burchard@horizon.math.utah.edu>
Reply-To: burchard@geom.umn.edu
Jon_Bosak@Novell.COM (Jon Bosak) writes:
> The best way to avoid multiple incompatible delivery
> languages and the loss of interoperability is to
> standardize on one system of markup capable of
> expressing the complete range of typographical effects
> needed for cross-platform online display and to convert
> to this delivery format from other languages optimized
> for authoring or domain-specific retrieval. This
> proposal leverages an existing standard, SDL, that is
> already available to serve as the basis for a common Web
> delivery language.
One question: is HDL sufficiently powerful to serve as a delivery
medium for mathematical and technical documents written in TeX?
In the current situation, such documents are typically served over
the Web as (1) PostScript [converted from DVI], (2) Hyper-TeX [really
hyper-DVI; requires modified DVI previewers], and/or (3) TeX source
[a big hassle!]. In the future, option (1) could migrate to Acrobat
documents, converted from Hyper-DVI to include hyperlinks.
Because TeX has dramatically raised the standards of typography for
technical manuscripts, any successful alternative delivery system
must have the ability to approach the same level of quality. I would
be curious whether you see HDL playing a role there.
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Paul Burchard <burchard@math.utah.edu>
``I'm still learning how to count backwards from infinity...''
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