The final output from DP is a text. This is processed through Guiguts. Most of the Post Processors in DP use Guiguts for post processing.   The html is generated from this text file.

So no additional work is involved in producing a text file.

Again there is no additional work in White Washing because of the text file.

On Sat, Sep 12, 2009 at 3:17 PM, Marcello Perathoner <marcello@perathoner.de> wrote:
James Adcock wrote:

There are many long and inglorious methods of indicating emphasis in plain-text including **asterix** and SHOUTING and _/underscore/_ and <i></i> and [i][/i] and they all suffer from the same problem: They are all not what the author wrote, at least not as implemented by the typically concurrently existing publisher.

No author wrote italics before word processors became available to the end user. They _underlined_ the passages that they wanted the publisher to highlight. The publisher then choose an appropriate way of highlighting: /italics/ or  s p a c e o u t  or SMALLCAPS.

Mediaeval copysts usually rubricated passages they wished to highlight.


Now say 100 years later PG says ignore those previous efforts we as the publisher of this day knows better than the original intent so we will substitute something else for what was actually printed.

So what? The brick-and-mortar publishers of yore ignored the previous efforts of the monastic scribes because it was too expensive to print twice with different inks.

They also ignored the underlining of the author and substituted an artifact of their choosing. Also that artifact was largely a function of the cultural environment: italics or spaceout.


What I don’t understand is why PG continues to be wedded to plain-text as an **input** encoding format demanded of people submitting texts to PG.

Nobody understands that. It is a waste of resources pure and simple.

Consider that:


* The bottleneck at DP is the post-processing stage.

* The post-processor is burdened with the creation of one surplus txt file.

* The whitewasher is burdened with one or more surplus txt files.

* Every error needs to be fixed in more than one place (in html and up to three txt files, plus as many zips)

* We could easily produce a (good enough) txt version from html on the fly with lynx in any encoding the user may want.







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Marcello Perathoner
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Sankar

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