Conference vaxuum::document_ft

282.0. "A success story (and a few minor bugs)" by SHIRE::DARNTON (Geoffrey Darnton Europe/IS) Tue Apr 21 1987 12:45

Up until very recently, I was a dedicated RUNOFF fan, and had been for 
some time. A couple of months or so ago I gave up trying to teach myself 
DOCUMENT with an earlier field test.

I had to do a paper for an international conference in the US in May, 
and was not very happy with sending them my RUNOFF output, so I decided 
to have another go.

On the Monday morning I could not spell DOCUMENT (well, just about!). I 
pumped my runoff source through the dsrgnc old conversion file, looked 
up the errors to try and learn some appropriate tags to replace the 
errors, made a few panic phone calls to people who know the product a 
lot better than me, and by Tuesday evening I had a very professional 
output using the Article doctype.

I sent off my paper to the conference organisers, and I just heard today 
that it is by far and away the best presented paper submitted by anybody 
for the conference. So full congratulations indeed to the people who have 
put the product together and seen it through so far. I am going to go 
through a quantum leap in quality of output. It is a real pity that the 
Conference is in May, and I won't be able to make any public comments 
about how the paper was produced.

In the course of this very quick learning, I came upon a few 'funnies '
which may or may not be bugs - I don't have the time at the moment to go 
right through this notes file and check everything, but as the product 
is in field test, I am entering here my observations so maybe someone 
could look at them

1. I got a few 'line-too-long' messages, and on examining the output, it 
should have been possible for the software to move the offending word 
onto the next line.

2. As a matter of style I used several indented lists with roman 
numerals on the outside, and lower case letters inside - the lower case 
numerals started the list, but after a return from an inner list 
reverted to uppercase numerals for the remainder of the list. Sometimes 
I got a <_roman_upper_case> tag undefined message.

3. I could not get a sequence of 4 full-page figures to work. Each time, 
half the figures took up two pages instead of one. I had to work around 
the problem by forcing a page break before each figure, specifying a 
size of 46 rather than full-page. I couldn't get the text to 'float' 
round a consecutive series of four full-page figures.

4. Sometimes the software will happily place a lone section heading at 
the foot of a column detached from the following column to which it 
relates.

So I am a converted DOCUMENT user now, and look forward to the product 
becoming generally available. Keep up the good work!

VAX DOCUMENT is scheduled to be announced next Monday (4/27) at DECUS. 
Watch this notes file for confirmation. Once that's happened, you can
make all the public statements you'd like!

--Brian Adler
  VAX DOCUMENT project leader

    
    ...and any of you who will be attending DECUS, be sure to visit
    the SSG products booth. Brian and I will be on hand there in the
    afternoons. We'd really like to meet you!
    
    -patti anklam

    
    but to answer your questions....
    
    1. the line-too-long messages can in some instances be ignored.
       we don't have a lot of control over this, but provide tags
       to help in final 'cleanup' of a document
    
    2. this bug with roman numerals was fixed in bl8
    
    3. Multi-page figures are never allowed to float.
    
    4. we are trying to capture as many widows as we can!
    
    -patti anklam