[Zope] Documents for web and paper

Robert OConnor rocon@pivot.net
Fri, 5 Mar 1999 11:57:34 -0500


I'm looking for the best way to store and
retrieve documents with these requirements:

SPECS
*Easy storage and retrieval on the web
*Pretty printing on paper
*Easy simple collaboration (no checkout)
*One BASE format for both web and paper
*Base format *could be* edited with
   Word or WP
*Preserve text markup:
   bullets, bolds, underlines,
   tables, graphics, links...etc.
*Search by keyword
*Search by full text


*******
I look forward to comments and
Ideas on implementing this in ZOPE
Perhaps some of this has been solved
already and I don't know it.

EXAMPLE:
Say you have a small book/article
 that is fully contained in a WORD
or WP file.

It has chapters and sections:

Chap1 Plants
      Section1: Trees
      Section2: Flowers
      Section3: Vegetables
      Section4: Fruits
Chap2 Animals
      Section1: Dogs
      Section2: Cats
      Section3: Fish
      Section4: Humans

Ok, as a paper document in the
word processor it is laid out *nice* with
a new page for each chapter, section,
and subheadings for groups of paragraphs in
each section. It prints *nice* and can
even have a table of contents and index.

For the web, the whole book could be
one LONNNG web page.  Ugly and it
doesn't work well.

Ideally on the web each chapter and section
would be navigable with a left hand frame
like table a la http://www.zope.org.  Then
sections can be placed on separate pages
on the right.  This means that the one source
document becomes multiple html
"files" on the web site.

*Tree Navigation
Ok, for tree navigation like
http://localhost:9673/QuickStart
Each Chapter and Section becomes a folder and
the text from each section is contained in the same
named: "dtContent"  as in
...9673/QuickStart/Outline/Applications/External/dtContent

While the tree is nice,  and separate html "files" make the
website better,

*REVISIONS with TWO OUTPUTS

How do you do:
Make revisions to the source document in word/WP
and have it FLOW automatically to html format or
tree format for the web?

*Perhaps* XML could come to the rescue as holy grail
to help solve this problem???  I understand the idea
of mark up but how does it solve the problem of two outputs?

Can you have a template that automatically chops up
the SOURCE into the appropriate folders/files etc and
feeds it to ZOPE?   Can this or another template reformat
for pretty printing including page numbers that are
updated based on the planned printing?

Maybe I need to reconsider how documents are
stored as source, i.e. not Word.  And if not,  what
tool or mechanism would be best?  Maybe the
NATIVE source could flow to Word/WP or
via a template making for pretty printing.

Maybe for simple stuff, the source could be
simple text entered on a webpage or sent
by e-mail with *simple* markup and parsed
automatically?

*KEYWORD SEARCH
Ok, on the web (and Zope), the benefit is it's
searchability:  Do we "hide" keywords in the
source somehow and in addition use Chapter
and Section titles as Keywords?

Search for: "dogs"  gives a result of
Chapter 2 Section 1 in the example as
one entry.  Additional entries might
be lessor cross references such as
a keyword "dog" in the Section 4 humans
as "man's best friend".

*FULL TEXT SEARCH
Ok so we search for the word "Daisy"
and this word is found in the text in
sections: Flowers, Dogs (as a pet name)
and Humans (as a proper name).

The result is then three line entries that
take you to the words.

*Zope IDEAS for this?

I assume that it would be best to store
the documents and source in the ZOPE
database rather than an external datasource.

Thanks for any input on this

-bobo connor   bob@rocnet.com