Re: [Tools-arch] Recommendation 6: Architectural model for clients

[Martin Thomson <[e-mail]>]

On Wed, Apr 28, 2021, at 07:50, John R Levine wrote:
> What they actually do is to use Joe Touch's MS Word template that lets 
> them type up a text draft, with boilerplate and page headers and such. 
> When they submit it, the RPC exports it as text and manually adds all of 
> the XML coding.  Considering that the authors surely know what is a header 
> and what is a paragraph or list as they create their drafts and probably 
> taggged much of it with Word styles, I'd say that's a pretty egregious 
> tool failure.  The authors I've talked to feel rather strongly that they 
> like Word and are not interested in switching.

That's a failure on our part then.  That process is not a good result for anyone involved.

It is relatively easy to use word to drive a process that produces XML.  The one I used recently involves all the same command-line tools, but with a step that converts the word into markdown.

It should be possible to build something more direct than that if there was enough interest.  I'm not volunteering, but suggesting that some of the LLC tools budget might be pointed in that direction.

> In AUTH48 we're just as weak -- author reviews and corrections are tracked 
> entirely by hand from email exchanges. In principle authors are supposed 
> to review the XML, in practice they rarely do, just some of the rendered 
> versions, and since we don't have an XML diff, even if you submitted XML, 
> it's hard to tell what changed in the final version.

I just got an XML diff from the RPC in AUTH48.