On Sat, Feb 24, 2001 at 04:08:08PM -0000, Óskar Guðlaugsson wrote:
> By all means, no! That is, don't drop out of the class. Of course we
> don't _want_ to make it hard for anyone to read our documents!
I'm sorry if I seemed to be overreacting. The message I responded to seemed
to be pretty negative about linux support ... and I've had a lot of
experiences with people changing from formats I _can_ use conveniently
to formats I can't use conveniently, generally in order to make the
microsoft users' experience just a little bit prettier (e.g. to have
better control of formatting).
The simple rule of thumb for making things accessible is "KISS" - Keep
It Simple Stupid. (Not saying you are stupid, though.) The fewer fancy
things you do, the more likely the results are to work everywhere ...
ancient microsoft computers (owned by people who can't afford to upgrade),
Macintoshes, Unix machines, text to Braille and text to speech translation
software (for the blind), etc., etc., etc..
This, of course, conflicts with the desire to make something that looks
good and has all kinds of special functionality. Most of the fancy stuff
is either proprietary enhancements to some standard, or so new that few
tools support it, even though it is standards conformant.
And note, by the way, that I'm not just talking about documents for this
course. At work, I have to contend with some really fancy javascript
based web pages (that I absolutely must use), which rely on javascript
features only present in top of the line versions of Internet Explorer,
and not present in any version of Netscape. Due to budget cuts, however,
they won't give me a PC capable of running such a recent version of
Internet Explorer ... so I get to use a variety of inconvenient kludges.
We've also got an engineer who is blind. She's having increasing difficulty
in doing her job, because her text to braille and text to speech translation
software has problems with such things as icons (without alt text labels)
and some recent java, javascript, VBscript, etc., etc..
OK, I guess that was a sermon. Back to the topic of this course, which is all
that's really relevant here.
> The formats available right now do not reflect any specific policy of
> ours. They reflect, rather, a lack of policy. The discussion about
> formats, by people much more knowledgeable about them than me, has
> left me confused. I got the impression that .rtf was the best format
> (please bear with my stupidity, I'm as much a beginner in computer
> standards as many here are in Old Norse), which was why I had let it
> suffice. The format which we had previously presented, along with
> the .doc, was .txt. The first lessons aren't available in .txt now
> because I haven't taken the time to convert the updated .doc files
> to .txt (it takes a little effort).
> Basically, I had no idea what was going on in the formats issue, and
> no understanding of it whatsoever (being an unimaginative MS user) so
> I bailed and let it hang. I ask you all not to accuse me of any
> unfriendly policy, because there is no policy.
>
> Can someone who understands the issue well enough, such as you,
> Arlie, please clarify it to me and write a workable list of the
> formats you believe are necessary? I'm all will, you see, and once I
> know what to do, I'll do it :)
Well, I'm not really an expert either. While I make my living programming,
I'm no expert on the variety of user interfaces available. In particular,
I haven't used a Macintosh since some time in the 80s. (Even though, back
in those dark ages, I used to develop software for them ... but that was
when they were very new.)
It looks like we have several potentially conflicting goals here:
- limited effort to prepare lessons (i.e. manually preparing and revising
multiple versions is a bad thing)
- clarity and aesthetic appearance of lessons (at a minimum, the icelandic
characters need to be visible to all readers, rather than showing
as hex codes, question marks, or simply not being displayed at all
(All things various tools do with characters they don't recognize.)
Preferably, it should be possible to include tables, and have them
appear correctly aligned (i.e. readable).
- limited effort for students (e.g. it's important not to have to do a long
manual process to read each lesson, and completely ridiculous to
have to retype the questions one is answering when sending in
solutions).
- and of course the obvious ... students need to be able to read the lessons,
and teachers need to be able to read the students' answers.
- and finally, I don't imagine anyone wants to spend lots of money buying
software, or (obviously ridiculous) new computer equipment.
Here's one suggestion that _might_ work ... please let me know what's wrong
with it.
Microsoft word produces readable text in its native form (for PC users).
It also has the ability to save files as html, and while the resulting
html is pretty horrible (to hand edit), I _think_ the resulting web
page looks pretty close to the appearance of the word document.
It can also save files as text (text with line breaks), losing all
the formatting (ugh) and making a horrible mess of line wrapping
(why does it make its lines 100 or so characters long?), but the
result is readable (except for tables, which may be incomprehensible
due to alignment problems). I'm not sure, but recent versions of word
(which I don't have) may be able to save as MS-RTF too, which may be
readable on some systems that can't handle word docs. (However, beware
of "recent versions of word"; microsoft products often save files that
can't be read by older versions of the same tool ... if your version of
word is too recent, my ancient one might choke on its output.)
There are some problems with this: first of all, it's a manual process, and
so error prone. All these versions have to be posted in multiple places,
which is a nuisance. More importantly, though, you have to remember to
_always_ edit the word version, and then use "save as" to save each of the
other formats. This is _very_ easy to mess up, and doubly so since using
"save as" changes word's belief as to which version you are editting.
(I.e. if you then use save, the result goes to (e.g.) the "text with
line breaks" version rather than the "doc" version.) Plus, I don't know
of any way to simply have a script that does all the version saving and
copying automatically; that's one of the _big_ problems with microsoft
products ... they don't understand that computers are better at tedious
repetitive work than humans, and humans should be able to simply tell
the computer what to do ... once.
The other big problem is microsoft specific special characters. Not the
eth's and thorns and accented vowels, but their dashes and "smart"
quotation marks. Using "save as text with linebreaks" these come out
as gobbletygook on non-MS computers, even when the icelandic characters
are perfectly readable. (The problem is that _these_ characters are not
part of the ISO standard everyone uses for icelandic text.) Also, certain
"special" icelandic characters; in particular, the oe ligature (and of course
the o with tail, which we've been representing as o with umlaut).
I don't know how hard it is for a microsoft user to avoid using these
characters. You don't need "smart" quotes for these lessons; plain ordinary
ones (as used in this email) are just as readable on microsoft systems, and
much more readable on other systems. But I don't know whether MS word will
_let_ you input an ordinary " or ' character; MS products tend to "know what
the user really wanted", and either force them to do things that way, or make
them manually correct each instance --- which would consume a lot of time
and effort. If _not_ reasonable to avoid these, I can write a script to fix
up the text with linebreaks version ... that's not a hard task ... but it
might be a nuisance to run it on the master versions, since I'm not sure
how hard it would be to make such a script that would work on a PC.
Oh, for the record: microsoft doc format has the potential to transmit
viruses, in the form of "word macros". So far, our teachers' systems
appear to be clean, but it's another potential issue with using word.
OK, that was long winded. Now let's get into things that I believe will not
work:
PDF - costs money to buy the tools to generate pdf files, and the resulting
documents cannot be conveniently quoted by a reader attempting to
respond ... i.e. we'd have to manually retype the exercises we're
responding to.
MS-RTF - I _think_ this is (a) MS-only, so practically anyone who can read
it can also read MS word format and (b) illegal to write translation
software for it (so the rest of us can't do _anything_ but buy PCs
to read it).
High power text formatting languages, such as TeX, LaTeX, troff, etc...
Far too much work to learn, probably do way more than is needed,
may not run on microsoft OSes, and may well cost money.
Web page "authoring" tools such as Front Page ... likely to produce
web pages that only work with internet explorer, and not to be
able to produce non-web page formats. Also costs money.
> BTW, I'm getting the impression that Microsoft's position in America
> is somehow not nearly as dominating as in countries like Iceland.
> Lots of Icelanders haven't even _seen_ non-MS OS. Perhaps this whole
> issue is a cultural misunderstanding (?).
Oh, that's true of a lot of Americans too. Basically, the non-MS users
are "dinosaurs" who got into computers before Microsoft became dominant;
professional programmers; and people who do work that Macintoshes have
historically supported better than Microsoft (mostly involving document
preparation and publishing). Those who recently "got a computer to get
on the Internet" have never seen anything but a PC, and can't imagine
anything different.
--
Arlie
(Arlie Stephens arlie@...)