VMs: Re: Numbered transcription

[Jan Hajic <hajic@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Very well written, Greg.

I, again, would put it even more strongly; XML is the only
way. Even those with Word [only] on their machines can read
it, search it, etc. And the existence of various formats and
tools makes it easy even for publication; don't forget that 
the "pictures" of the glyphs are only the last stage, for 
things to be published; all research should be done and 
thought of in 7-bit ASCII, I'd say...

-- Jan
PS By saying XML, I really mean XML, even though I would
still say that there is no need to reinvent the wheel, and
thus the TEI DTD should be considered in the first place
among various XML DTDs that people might think of.

On Tue, 1 Oct 2002, Greg Stachowski wrote:

> On Tue, 1 Oct 2002, GC wrote:
> 
> > I guess at least temporarily I'm back to my old idea of a
> > passworded Word.doc.  The font can be imbedded in these documents,
> <snip>
> > have the password, and the document returned by e-mail, since Word
> <snip>
> >I know we have a few out there who are still poking away on Wang
> > or Wordstar 1.0, and storing everything on 8 1/2" floppy disks or
> > 8-track tape drives.  For them I can do little more in the line of
> <snip>
> 
> While supporting the ideas of using much more visual information (I
> still have to look up a lot of the list EVA before I can visualise it),
> I think I need to comment on this.
> 
> Yes, perhaps there are those of us who use amber-screen Wang terminals.
> But there are also those of use who use dual gigahertz PIII's running ...
> Linux. Who use Word once in a blue moon when someone sends them a .doc
> that nothing else will read. Who also don't use Outlook and don't send
> mail from within Word or Outlook. Not to mention the different and
> incompatible Word versions in use. 6. 7. 95. 97. 2000. XP. Which are we
> going to use? Which do you use? With all due respect, I'm not going to go
> out and spend several hundred dollars upgrading my version of Office
> solely to read VMS transcriptions in a proprietary format. XML may be
> clumsy but at least it's portable, open and future-proof. (Yes I know
> there is StarOffice/OpenOffice, I use them, but can you guarantee that
> you're version of Word will write a file that they can read? Not
> everything works, particularly the more obscure features which may well be
> the ones you need.)
> 
> There maybe only a handfull (though surely more than 9) people who
> _regularly_ contribute to the list, but there are certainly significantly
> more who would like to follow this effort and quite possibly comment on
> it. The fact that they don't comment all the time doesn't mean that they
> won't. That's the very point of this list, its open to everyone to read
> and write to when they wish; isolating a part of the effort in proprietary
> technologies is, in my opinion, the wrong way to go.
> 
> Now, having said that, the Word idea does have advantages, particularly in
> the early stages when the transcription is being bounced around and
> corrected. But before plunging in you need to think about how to make this
> accessible to as many people as possible. Perhaps Word *is* the best
> way, in which case I will dust off my Windows partition and just get
> on with it, and hope my Word will read your Word's files. But there are
> alternatives to Word which will do the same thing. TeX is one, PDF is
> another, XML is a third. There is also free software for collaborative web
> pages (once discussed on-list). We need to agree on a technology that will
> bring the effort to the widest number of people. Perhaps we could run a
> test? Distribute one or two pages and see if all those interested can
> handle it?
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Greg
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