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From: acli@byron.net4.io.org (Ambrose Li)
Subject: Mixed text [was: Re: Pinyin
Message-ID: <E3wL5z.Co2@byron.net4.io.org>
Supersedes: <E3vr2v.5on@byron.net4.io.org>
Organization: somewhere in Scarborough, Canada running C News CR.E and some assorted hacks for NNTP (including a hacked nntpxmit derived from NNTP 1.5.12)
Date: Sun, 12 Jan 1997 16:15:34 GMT
References: <32C892DC.1BDD@scruznet.com> <E3JwxH.F24@midway.uchicago.edu> <32D1E070.CD8@scruznet.com> <E3o75x.FKC@midway.uchicago.edu>
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On Wed, 8 Jan 1997 03:32:21 GMT, in article <E3o75x.FKC@midway.uchicago.edu>, Daniel von Brighoff <deb5@midway.uchicago.edu> wrote:
>I found it hard to believe that major university publishing houses
>(Cambridge, UofC, Yale, etc.) do not have both the software and the
>personnel to handle mixed text in-house.  At some point, the writer is
>giving her editors a list of character equivalents so they make the
>appendix.  Why, at this moment, they cannot do a global change
>(romanisation -> romanisation + characters) is utterly beyond me.  It's
>not like it would raise the page count unduly.

Perhaps that's because they still use off-line batch
formatters instead of wysiwyg software. With batch formatters
it's quite a mess if you do a global replace of a more than
one word. Even global replaces of single words might not be
straightforward because of possible intervening markup. That
said, I prefer to use, and am using, off-line batch formatters;
at least the formatters are reliable. Some of the wysiwyg
programs just trash your files any time they feel like it.

Not that batch formatters can't handle mixed text, though.
(With perhaps some effort, they can.) In fact you don't quite
need global replaces for this purpose because macros will handle
mixed text more elegantly than global replaces.

>By the same token, as anyone who typed (as opposed to input) a term paper
>can tell you, footnotes used to be a major headache.  Now, with software
>than can instantly format them perfectly, they are harder and harder to
>find. 

Such software existed at least 15 years ago (TeX, for example).
Perhaps not `instantly' like what you think, but instantly enough,
and perfectly too.

-- 
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