ANNOUNCE: erlguten

[Joe Armstrong]

>  > Erlguten design will reflect this - the idea (not yet implemented)
>  > is to have a small number of templates + a large database of articles.
> 
> Hmmm, I can understand why you might have a large database of
> articles, but I tend to have a large collection of text snippets.  I don't
> write an entire document at one sitting.  I tend to collect interesting
> items, and I tend to write in bursts or throw down some ideas that
> I rework later.  I string them together when I need to produce a
> document, and I reuse some of the ideas in later communications.
> I do keep my finished documents, but my unfinished docs and notes
> and snippets outnumber my finished documents.  I don't consider
> received email a good candidate for a "document" but I would like to
> display them in different ways.  When researching, I may quote
> from several of them, interspersed with explanation (sort of like
> this ramble).  I want a database of snippets that I can easily
> reorganize and format for pretty output, sometimes creating
> "documents" from them.
> 

yes - this is exactly what I do. My hard-disks (on about half a dozen
different machines) have thousands of files with small fragments of information 
in them.

My "grand plan" addresses the following problem:

	storing things
	finding things
	presenting things

ErlGuten is a start at solving the third problem. In my plan
*all* things with be tagged with GUIDs - to make a book
you first *find* the things you want to publish (problem 2)
retrieve them from storage (problem 1) and publish the result
(problem 3) - In Erlguten (1) and (2) are ignored - the file
system is used and I *know* where things are.


> 
>  > I read that a typesetter setting newsprint on a Linotype machine
>  > could enter properly formatted text 4 times faster than with a
>  > modern desk top publishing system. This was *not* WYSIWYG
>  > but all done single key type setting commands ...
> 
> Oh gosh, that brings back memories.  PageMaker v1.0 had just
> come outand we compared using PM to a low-level command line program
> that was like linotype with single keystroke formatting.  Way faster
> for anything more than a newsletter, and kerning down to 1/1100
> of an inch.  I typeset a 40 page manual on the *new* Mac (in 1985,
> when the term WYSIWYG was first being used) using the typesetting
> software and sent the digital file to a Linotype shop for printing.  The
> software let me use any PostScript commands and just generated a
> raw PostScript file, I don't think anything else like it was around it the
> time other than Linotype which was at least $35K for a workstation
> and you still needed to take it to a printer.  Just a shell interface with
> an editor and lots of WordPerfect-style embedded formatting.
> 
>  > If anybody knows how to get a Linotype manual can they mail me :-)
> 
> Unfortunately I never got my hands on the Linotype machine or the
> manual but remember seeing them and drooling.  What a geek!
> Can't remember the name of the program we used.

What were the typesetting codes - help - these guys thought about this stuff
for decades - this must be the intermediate langauge used by a typesetting language


> Hey, let me know when the beer thing is!  I would like to be in on it
> if I can arrange it geographically.  I think West London is closer to me.
> 

I think Stockholm doesn't really count as "east London" - we'll have to
introduce paypal beer tokens :-)

/Joe


> jay
> 
>