chuq (chuq von rospach) (09/08/88)
This is just a note to let folks know that this group is back and alive
again, now that I'm back from vacation. Thanks for your patience over the
delays in getting material out.
Since this is as good a time as any to turn over a new leaf, so to speak,
I'd like to announce some changes in the content and orientation of the
group. As an initial explanation, let me quote from one of the adminstrivia
letters I had waiting for me when I got back:
The desktop publishing list/newsgroup was a good thing. I just wish
people would talk more about issues of design, use, and
ramifications of desktop publishing/design/whatever systems and not
so much about which system is better, or how to get whatever kind
of system for whatever kind of machine.
I agree fully with this comment, and this isn't the first person who's
dropped off the list because there's too much techie-talk and too little
desktop-publishing discussion.
Starting now, I'm going to be more aggressive in my moderation. This group
shouldn't be a place discuss laser printers, or CGA boards, or IBM vs. Mac
DTP wars. I originally envisioned this group as a place to sit down and
discuss design issues. We've sidetracked ourselves into feature lists.
If the message can be handled reasonably by another list and doesn't
deal with the process of desktop publishing, you can expect me to send
it back with a suggestion of where to post it. The boundaries are very
flexible -- so I'm asking in advance to get feedback from people about
whether I'm over-moderating or under-moderating this thing, but I think it's
critical that we put our focus where I think it should have been in the
first place.
As some initial examples of what I'm talking about, here are things I now
plan on rejecting that I probably would have accepted in the past:
o Laser printer discussions: if you want to discuss laser printers (as
opposed to the use of laser printers in dtp) I'm going to refer you to
the laser-lovers groups.
o IBM (or, for that matter, Macintosh) hardware/software discussions. These,
unless they tie closely into DTP, will be referred to the
hardware-specific groups (info-mac/info-ibmpc and the USENET equivalents).
Discussions like Pagemaker/Ventura or Pagemaker/ReadySetGo will still be
allowed, as long as the focus is DTP.
o IBM vs. Mac: Who needs another religious war, anyway?
o TeX: I'm going to define TeX, troff, and the non-WYS... as being non-DTP
unless the discussion moves to design issues in those products. I view the
focus of the group to be more towards interactive design and publishing
tools rather than document formatting systems.
We'll see how this works out. And I'm interested in feedback on how things
are going. But I feel rather strongly that we should look at discussing
desktop publishing techniques, not desktop publishing tools -- too many
USENET groups have been turned into nothing more than continuing religious
wars with lots of arguing and very little discussion and information. I want
to try to avoid that here.
Finally, don't forget the desktop publishing archive. Soon to be updated to
include all messages through the start of the vacation, it has everything
that has been discussed in the dtp group to date.
chuq
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