I just want to have a convenient way to compose documents (
any documents for
any purpose) defining their meaning, not formatting text and page layout. Also, to make those documents easy to read and understand, i need a possibility to give them an appropriate formatting (cleanly separated from content and structure).
Well, it seems like there's no such way =(
I'm sick of software like MS Word.
I've discovered and installed
LaTeX. It works well (few localization-related problems still exist though). Yes, LaTeX really rocks, but as i see it's very hard to give the result desired look — if this look is different to existing document presets. Sure, LaTeXed document is typographically correct, and it looks neat, but i want more... And still there are problems with content-structure-formatting separation in LaTeX (explained in
this post).
I've started to think about
XML + Adobe InDesign chain. It should be great if XML's interoperability and power of information organization can be combined with InDesign's power of information presentation.
But it turned out that this also isn't an ideal solution. I thought i can just write an XML document as i see it, import it to InDesign and then do anything with its data presentation there. But this approach doesn't work. Yes, with InDesign i can help well-structured document become well-looking, i can even keep InDesign document in sync with changing XML data (via Links panel), but the problem is that I have to write XML specially for this software.
For example, i see term definition in XML this way:
<termdef term="YAML">A human-readable data serialization format</termdef>
But InDesign doesn't care of XML attributes, so i need to write something like
<term>YAML</term>
<def>A human-readable data serialization format</def>
(Relation between the term and its definition becomes less obvious.)
Though it seems like InDesign will become too complex if it gets enough options to manage with all XML features.
Well, this world isn't perfect, and there's no perfect solution yet here. Though maybe i'm missing something. Still searching...
Labels: semantic, xml