The Un-Format for Un-Writing
I'm preparing materials for leading a seminar on book formatting in the months to come, and I've been reviewing my own learning journey for raw material. I hope, like in most things, to guide others not so much by my good choices, but at least to steer them away from the bad ones. The biggest feat I had to overcome, and the one that opens the lecture, is the almost Zen activity of not-formatting, in preparation for final formatting. I'm not unfamiliar with the idea of "semantic tagging" as this has been something that's come up in my software engineering career, even back to the dark days of the web (it's better to use <em>...</em> than <i>...</i> for example.) Word processing software has ruined us, and the web hasn't helped. We're a people that are accustomed to what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG.) But formatting, especially for different targets, requires that we don't get what we see. Writing a manuscript, an e...