And though each project's final phase involves a great deal of manual work resulting in a polished text that is the basis for both the versions released to PG, it's interesting to note that there is no facility provided for actually preserving this foundation text version. Oversimplifying a bit, the text version removes a bunch of information, and the html version adds a bunch of stuff. Arguably the most valuable text (for content and metadata) is, at best, on someone's PC somewhere. Or more likely discarded. On Wed, Dec 16, 2009 at 8:19 PM, Andrew Sly <sly@victoria.tc.ca> wrote:
Well, be careful you are not laboring under misunderstandings. The output of DP (that is to say, what comes out of round F2) is _not_ a finished text.
Yes, there is some propriatory markup used at DP. However calling it a "format" is going too far. I would call it "suggestive markup". That is, its purpose is to record some information about layout and format for the post-processor to use when they produce html and/or text files.
The output of the rounds at DP usually contains plenty of ambiguities (such as the propriatoy <tb>, which you may want to ignore or render in different ways depending on the text), proofer's notes (such as "is this a typo?"), and other inconsistancies. It is the job of the post-processor to take all this, ask for help if needed with any of the issues with the particular text, and produce the final texts which are submitted for posting.
--Andrew