On 2018-05-14 18:34, Richard Gaskin via use-livecode wrote:
Ralph DiMola wrote:
Richard I agree. I have customers that we are nudging toward EPubs for
the reasons you've enumerated but when they see the amount of work
involved they fall back to the "Well our employees are using MSWord
and just PDF them.
Yes, updating tooling is key for adoption.
I suspect the main issue here is not the tooling - semantic based
document description tooling has existed for as long as PDF has...
Unfortunately, most people (when writing documents) don't think
semantically - they still write as they see / want to see - which is
quite a human thing.
Compared to the cost of programing new tools, re-programming humans is
an order of magnitude more expensive ;)
As much as I like that vision, it seems odd to me that other tools
like office suites can output HTML, but not in a form that works with
EPub with less effort than we'd need in LC.
I think office suites can - if the people writing the documents use
appropriate semantic styling and document structure - rather than just
using 'indent', bold and font styles - see my above comment ;)
Even just copying from a PDF can yield wildly unpredictable results
when pasted into any other app. It's a rare day when I can copy
content from a PDF into an email and not have to remove a mystifyingly
large number of spaces and other characters not at all visible in the
rendered PDF within its specialized viewer app.
Heh - yes that is a common gripe - I cannot deny...
However, that's not a problem with PDF per-se - it is more a problem
with the tools which produce the PDFs, and the tools which extract the
text. Neither is an easy problem to get right (the latter is harder than
the former) - but it can be done.
After all if a human can work out the ordering / flow of text on a page
by looking at it, then a computer should be able to - there is no
'magic' there, just a little bit of global page analysis which humans
are better at than computers (well better at than the developers who are
encoding the required global page analysis into algorithms a computer
can use). (OCR software has been doing this for years much better than
most PDF readers do today).
Remember - a PDF is nothing more than a description of marks on a page -
a bit like a list of instructions you would give a human to reproduce
it.
Warmest Regards,
Mark.
--
Mark Waddingham ~ m...@livecode.com ~ http://www.livecode.com/
LiveCode: Everyone can create apps
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