[Zope] a win for structured text

[John Hunter]

I am running a zope site for the Epilepsy Surgery Dept data here at
the U of C, managing patient information: EEGs, MRIs, that kind of
things.  One of our users is a veteran neuro-surgeon from Soviet
Georgia who is providing, among other things, the seizure diagnosis
and summaries.  He is used to working in Microsoft Word and wanted the
ability to add bold, emphasis etc...  I explained that web browsers
didn't support that kind of stuff in the same way that MS Word did,
but that he could use structured text.

To keep is simple, I only showed him only how to use bold and
emphasis.  I wrote on a piece of paper to demonstrate:

  Bold:  **This sentence is bold**
  Emphasis:  *This sentence is emphasized*

He balked, saying this would take him too long, and I retorted, "no
this is easy, just an extra character here and there".  He said "This
will make my 3 page patient summaries 6 pages long".  It took about 15
minutes before I realized that he thought he had to type the whole
damned sentence above every time he wanted to make something bold, ie,
to make the phase "partial seizures" bold in the sentence below, he
would have to type:

  The patient presented with a **This sentence is bold**partial
  seizure.

Well, once that was cleared up he appeared satisfied.  He came back
this morning with several summaries completed, filled with proper
structured text markup.  He had gone home the night before and written
it in Word, and came in the morning and pasted it into the web form.
That gave me a particular sense of satisfaction: writing structured
text in Word.

This morning I printed up plenty of rich examples for him -- tables,
lists, links, the works.  We'll see where he goes.

John Hunter