[Zope] Structured text is inconvenient esp. w BackTalk
Asad Quraishi
aquraishi@skyesystems.com
Wed, 26 Feb 2003 16:00:00 -0500
I agree with your analysis on STX, programmers, and end-users. I am
looking for an editing solution that is user-friendly for non-technical
users.
Does the IE WYSIWYG editor produce STX? Is it producing HTML and
delivering via WEBDAV? I'd love to know which editor your are using,
why & how you are using it.
Thanks.
Luciano Ramalho wrote:
> I've found out through experience that most non-programmers find it
> very dificult to understand and use Structured Text.
>
> Grokking STX requires thinking about computerized text in a way that
> makes no sense to most users, although it is very natural for
> programmers. Structuring by indentation, the relevance of whitespace
> and many other STX rules are only "intuitive" for us. Also, to be
> productive in STX you must use a programmer's editor, and they don't
> behave like user's expect. Word and Notepad simply don't work for STX
> editing (auto-indent is missing, for one thing).
>
> After a few failed attempts, we gave up trying to push STX as a
> solution to non-techies. We now use a WYSIWIG editor which
> unfortunately is only IE 5.5/6.0 compatible (this is not a real
> problem for our intranet clients, who already have standardized
> around IE).
>
> We are actively looking for a Mozilla compatible WYSIWYG editor.
>
> As a final note, I'd like to say that personally I like very much the
> idea of STX and think the current implementation is very useful and
> useable. But I am not a typical end-user at all: believe it or not, I
> am one of the people who invented the "ASCII Ribbon" campaign against
> the use of HTML in e-mails...
>
> ---------
> /"\
> \ / Campanha da Fita ASCII - Diga NAO ao HTML em emails
> X ASCII Ribbon Campaign - Say NO to HTML in email
> / \
> ---------
>
> Luciano
>
>
> On quarta-feira, fev 26, 2003, at 16:54 America/Sao_Paulo, Asad
> Quraishi wrote:
>
>> Thanks Chris,
>>
>> The reason I am trying to use OO vs. something like emacs is that as
>> we propose the use of Zope/Plone to our clients we want to offer
>> them a solution which they will understand in the context of a world
>> of word processors. It is difficult for someone to convert their
>> word processor-based training manuals, for example, into a BackTalk
>> book based on how structured text works. I don't mind emacs but
>> clients won't feel quite as comfortable.
>>
>> Any thoughts on this?
>>
>> Chris McDonough wrote:
>>
>>> Structured text has some well-known idiosyncrasies. One of these is
>>> that a body paragraph is defined as a block of lines followed by a
>>> carriage return where each line is indented to the same number of
>>> characters. Another is that a "heading" is defined as a single
>>> line of
>>> text followed by a carriage return and a further-indented block of
>>> text. Your examples show that you've created something that you think
>>> is a body paragraph, although structured text rules consider it a
>>> heading because it has no line breaks. Structured text has these
>>> idiosyncrasies because one of its tenets is that its source should
>>> be as
>>> "human-readable" as its rendering.
>>>
>>> For an example of "correct" structured text formatting, see
>>> http://www.zope.org/Documentation/Books/ZopeBook/2_6Edition/
>>> ScriptingZope.stx/document_src (and its rendering at
>>> http://www.zope.org/Documentation/Books/ZopeBook/2_6Edition/
>>> ScriptingZope.stx).
>>>
>>> You're not doing anything wrong, really, but BackTalk does make the
>>> assumption that you are willing to author your content in structured
>>> text (this is mentioned prominently in the docs). If you step outside
>>> the bounds of structured text, your formatting will suffer, as you've
>>> found out. I'd suggest using an indent-aware text editor instead of
>>> OpenOffice. I use emacs in "indented-text-mode" via External
>>> Editor. BackTalk can also create PDFs, so if you're comfortable
>>> with editing
>>> like this, you can deliver PDFs to your customer instead of .doc
>>> files. On the other hand, if structured text is hamstringing you,
>>> you might
>>> want to consider using something other than BackTalk, because it's
>>> nontrivial to teach it to use an input format different than
>>> structured
>>> text.
>>>
>>> On Wed, 2003-02-26 at 10:49, Asad Quraishi wrote:
>>>
>>>> Here's the application:
>>>>
>>>> We have Zope and Plone installed and working for some months. We
>>>> also installed BackTalk and CMFBackTalk in order to publish docs
>>>> with inline comments in Plone. Works but there must be a better
>>>> way. Let me explain:
>>>>
>>>> We create our documents in OpenOffice (OO) and then cut and paste
>>>> them into stx docs. This works fine. However to use stx you have
>>>> to indent each heading/content level. I can do this in a
>>>> paragraph indent scenario like this with a BackTalk comment example:
>>>> --------
>>>> This is a Heading
>>>>
>>>> This paragraph has the first line indented but all of the other
>>>> lines will wrap
>>>> over to start flush with the margine. This is how it should work
>>>> so that I can
>>>> cut my content after commenting and paste in back in my OO doc.
>>>> It also
>>>> turns 'This is a Heading' into a heading. I can continue with
>>>> first line indents in
>>>> order to generate different heading levels.<p>
>>>>
>>>> % this is a comment
>>>> --------
>>>>
>>>> When I do this, first of all I don't get a comment icon unless I
>>>> break the rules (i.e. no inline html) and enter a <p> at the end
>>>> of the paragraph where I want it. However this creates another
>>>> problem. Once the comment is entered, since it is indented it
>>>> makes the paragraph above it a heading. It also removes the
>>>> comment icon once a comment is entered.
>>>>
>>>> However if I do this:
>>>> ------------
>>>> This is a Heading
>>>>
>>>> The paragraph following is created by indenting the entire
>>>> paragraph / and
>>>> having to enter CR's at the end of each line. Boy this makes
>>>> it a pain to
>>>> enter the text into word processor afterwards.
>>>>
>>>> % the comment is indented again but doesn't turn the above
>>>> paragraph
>>>> into a heading
>>>> -----------
>>>>
>>>> This works. The paragraph above the comment doesn't become a
>>>> heading and the comment icon remains meaning I can enter as many
>>>> comments for one paragraph as I like. This really sucks when I
>>>> want to paste it back into OO.
>>>>
>>>> What am I doing wrong? Is our process wrong? i.e. "create doc in
>>>> OO -> copy to stx -> comment with BackTalk --> copy back to OO for
>>>> formatting and delivery to client as .doc"
>>>>
>>>> Thanks.
>>>>
>>>> - Asad
>>>>
>>>>
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>>>
>>>
>>>
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>>
>>
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