At 22:19 14/02/97 GMT, you wrote:
>Message written at 14 Feb 1997 21:46:22 +0000
>In-reply-to: <3.0.32.19970214173150.006e5188@sdps.demon.co.uk> (message from
>	Richard Wentk on Fri, 14 Feb 1997 17:32:08 +0000)
>
>I really do not agree with...
>
>2. Doing it this way will make it easy to use whatever editing and layout
>features are available on each platform. This is important from a reader's
>point of view! ASCII may be freely interchangeable, but when you compare
>plain ASCII to Postscript it's actually pretty damn hard to read.
>
>ASCII is readable and clear while Postscript is fuzzy, one cannot see
>enough of it, and while OK for a quick glance, cannot be read as a
>document.  I see a number of theses as postscript, and they are next
>to useless.

True if you're working onscreen. Not true if you're browsing through a
printed reference. My guess is beginners tend to do the latter, experts
tend to do the former. Print gives an introductory overview which
electronic media don't. Once you have the overview, then having onscreen
notes about specific details becomes useful. 

Print also has the advantage of not requiring a huge screen resolution. Not
everyone has a monster monitor where you can hide things away in a corner
and still have a useful working area. (Besides, you can read print in the
kitchen when you're boiling the kettle and thinking.) 

For print, layout matters *a lot*. My ASCII printout of the manual was next
to useless until I got hold of the Postscript copy - I could never find a
damn thing in it when I wanted to.

***BUT*** - perhaps I should remind everyone that the point I was making
was about using whatever display/editing tools work best on each platform
to get the most readable and accessible result, and not the virtues and
vices of Postscript. (Not an issue I have any particular feelings about.)

I still maintain that working with a raw-ASCII distribution of updates,
tidied up and made more legible with whatever editing tools work best on
each platform, is a good idea. And indeed that it's a better idea than a
one-size-fits-all solution which is inevitably going to sell some people
short. 

E.g so far as I know us non-Unix PC users have *no* access to SGML, in any
shape or form. Doing an SGML manual is therefore a waste of time as far as
we're concerned. I'm sure the same applies to other options on other formats. 

The bottom line - all generic formats have serious disadvantages. Raw ASCII
edited to best effect and then distributed for each machine doesn't. In
fact it has important advantages, which won't ever be possible with a
generic solution.

R.