ted@imsvax.UUCP (Ted Holden) (10/09/85)
My apologies to anyone who has seen this article more than once. We've
been having major problems with usenet in the D.C. area. Since Sept. 15,
when the CVL computer at U. Md. was taken down with no warning to anyone
below it on usenet (which is most of the D.C. area), very little has
gotten through one way or the other. For awhile, it will be difficult to
tell what has gotten through and what hasn't.
This article concerns word-processing document transmission
and also a typesetting and graphics system which is vastly
superior to TROFF and other such archaic packages which are,
nonetheless, still in large-scale use on UNIX systems.
The need for inter-vendor transmission of DOCUMENTS in such a
manner as to preserve word processing FUNCTIONS, as well as
page-image, is fairly recent. The Navy saw three or four reasons
for wanting to have the capability: 1. as a guarantee that an
organization doesn't lose a ten year base of documents if one
particular vendor should go belly-up (i.e. they could translate
their store of documents to some other vendor's format), 2. for
transmitting documents around the office or around the world as
opposed to printing 100 copies of a document and MAILING them to
100 people, some of whom could be in Germany or New Zealand, and
3. as a means of mixing and matching the talents of differing
kinds of office equipment. It is this last possibility which
should most interest Unix gurus, as I shall describe momentarily.
Pairwise routines for word processing document format
conversion, whether in the form of contractors or of "black
boxes", are expensive, a pain to use, and generally only
support a few popular formats. There is a further problem with
DCA/DISOSS, which is IBM's solution to the document conversion
problem; DCA itself corresponds almost exactly to the
functionality of a 1965 typewriter. It is essentially impossible
to write reasonably accurate translation programs between DCA and
the file structure of any reasonable 1985 word processing system.
Documents being transmitted from system A to system B via
DCA/DISOSS can be counted on to arrive in mangled condition.
A user can only feel good about sending a document over the
lines if he can count on it looking right when it gets there. You
particularly don't want tabs, decimal tabs, or indenting to get
mis-translated or end up on the wrong columns; that could change
the meaning of a document. This years numbers could end up in
last years column, profits could end up looking like losses,
debits as credits.....
The United States Navy's Document Interchange Format (DIF,
not to be confused with Visicorp's DIF, which means "Data
Interchange Format") is the best available solution to these
problems. The Navy DIF was deliberately set up to correspond to
the file structure of a reasonable 1985 word processor, with
functionality chosen as a maximum common subset of the
capabilities of the products of the Navy's largest vendors. The
DIF's functionality was also chosen so as to be easily "reachable"
by translation programs, so that DIF translations between diverse
systems tend to be surprisingly accurate, good enough, in fact, to
send documents over the wire and expect them to look right when
they get there.
The most interesting possibility which all this has to offer
to UNIX types, involves the Xerox 8010 "Star". This, or it's
newest incarnation, the Xerox 6085, soon to be announced, is the
world's ultimate typesetting, graphics, and publication quality
word-processing system. Anything which can be done slowly and
painfully with TROFF or any of it's derivatives, can be done with
a few keystrokes on the 8010, exactly like using any other
word-processor functions. The 8010 beats the hell out of TROFF or
any other such package. The 8010 incorporates a 1024x1024
graphics screen; typesetting functions appear WYSIWYG on the
screen, and its graphics are good enough for CAD-CAM. Math
symbols, Greek letters, the Cyrillic alphabet, Kanji characters
etc. all come easily to the 8010. Anyone who has used an 8010
would get violently ill if he ever had to use TROFF again.
Now, the 8010 is not the fastest or least expensive
word-processor in the world, and it used to be the odd-man-out in
Xerox's line-up. Potential customers would be amazed by it but
noted that it was compatible with absolutely nothing, and figured
they either needed 100 of them (which they couldn't afford), or
they didn't need any, and walked out shaking their heads. Given
the Navy's DIF, however, since the 8010 has DIF routines, an
amazing possibility presents itself. If 95 percent of the work on
a given document could be done on a PC or some cheap UNIX machine,
and the document then shifted body-and-soul to the 8010 for
finishing touches (typesetting and/or graphic boilerplate), and
then printed on the 8010's laser printer, then the power of the
8010 has been magnified 20 to 1; the input load has been
effectively removed from it. An organization could thus make very
good use of one or two 8010s, which are not that difficult to
afford, especially since their price has come down drastically in
the last year or two.
Integrated MicroComputer Systems Inc. of Rockville, Md. has
DIF translation programs available for the SSI WordPerfect
package for PC's, as well as for the Fortune:Word package on the
Fortune 32:16 micro. Either can be used with an 8010 in the
manner just described. Other vendors whose word processing
packages have DIF routines which have proven acceptable to the
Navy include DataPoint (VistaWord), Hewlett-Packard (3000), DEC
(Wps), IBM (Display-Write on the PC), AT&T (CrystalWriter), and
CPT. A number of other firms are presently at work on DIF
software. Anyone interested in this software may call IMS at 301
984-8343 and ask for Ted Holden, Dick Jeffries, or Gary Evans. I
will also be glad to answer inquiries addressed through UNIX mail.michaelm@bcsaic.UUCP (michael b maxwell) (10/12/85)
In article <423@imsvax.UUCP> ted@imsvax.UUCP (Ted Holden) writes: > ...the Xerox 8010 "Star". This, or it's > newest incarnation, the Xerox 6085, soon to be announced, is the > world's ultimate typesetting, graphics, and publication quality > word-processing system. Anything which can be done slowly and > painfully with TROFF or any of it's derivatives, can be done with > a few keystrokes on the 8010, exactly like using any other > word-processor functions. The 8010 beats the hell out of TROFF or > any other such package. The 8010 incorporates a 1024x1024 > graphics screen; typesetting functions appear WYSIWYG on the > screen, and its graphics are good enough for CAD-CAM. Math > symbols, Greek letters, the Cyrillic alphabet, Kanji characters > etc. all come easily to the 8010. Anyone who has used an 8010 > would get violently ill if he ever had to use TROFF again. Well, I have a slightly different opinion. I've used NROFF (not, admittedly, TROFF), and Stars. The Stars are fine if you don't have any fancy formatting to do. BUT--if you want any of the following: 1. footnotes (as opposed to endnotes) 2. automatically numbered foot- or endnotes 3. automatic section numbering 4. automatic figure numbering 5. cross-references to any of the numbers in (2-4) which will automatically change when the original number changes (e.g. if you insert a new figure between fig. 2 and fig. 3, and later in the paper you refer to "figure 3"--now "figure 4") 6. reverse-indent paragraphs (I'm not talking about paragraphs like these, with a hanging tag, but rather about paragraphs in which the first line is "undented" a fixed number of spaces regardless of the length of the first word--e.g. as in some common bibliography formats) All of the above are common in "scholarly" papers, and I suspect in many other disciplines too (TV scripts, plays, ...). If I'm doing funny alphabets, then yes, I think I like the Star. But it's a horror if I have some particular format I have to follow. I suspect there are other thinks it can't do, but maybe there is a work-around, so I won't show my ignorance. A Star probably could be made to do most of the above by suitable reprogramming, although I've long wondered how a WYSIWYG WP could do #5. Until it/ they do, I guess I'll have to stick with N/Troff for some of my papers. I.e. use a screw-driver for screws, and a chisel for... -- Mike Maxwell Boeing Artificial Intelligence Center ..uw-beaver!{uw-june,ssc-vax}!bcsaic!michaelm
guy@sun.uucp (Guy Harris) (10/12/85)
> The most interesting possibility which all this has to offer > to UNIX types, involves the Xerox 8010 "Star". An even more interesting possibility for UNIX types is the Interleaf document preparation system. It's more interesting because it runs under UNIX on Suns; I believe it also runs on Apollos, although I don't know what OS it runs under, and it may run on other UNIX workstations with large bit-mapped displays. It's a *very* fast WYSIWYG editor (it reformats paragraphs *and* pages as you type), and supports graphics as well. The Xerox D-machines run Pilot rather than UNIX, although I've heard rumblings about C compilers (although ask anybody who's done a C compiler for a vanilla Perq about how easy it is to do C compilers and libraries for word-addressed stack machines). Xerox has finally released the Xerox Development Environment, at least for the 6085. I don't know if there are DIF functions for Interleaf, but it's worth asking. Interleaf is in Cambridge; I don't have any more information on them. Guy Harris
chris@umcp-cs.UUCP (Chris Torek) (10/12/85)
I beg to differ: Star is a mess. ViewPoint, however, looks very nice. (ViewPoint is the new version of Star, with applications for it being written in XDE 4.0---a.k.a. XDE 12.0E---and offers, among other things, vastly improved speed and many moveable windows. Star allows only four windows at a time, and has many bugs. Whether ViewPoint has fixed the worst of these, only time will tell, since it is not yet available.) -- In-Real-Life: Chris Torek, Univ of MD Comp Sci Dept (+1 301 454 4251) UUCP: seismo!umcp-cs!chris CSNet: chris@umcp-cs ARPA: chris@mimsy.umd.edu