This only happened in the past few years. Circa 2005 for the small publishers, circa 2010 for folks like Penguin and Macmillan.
To do a transition to HTML5 would require ubiquitous, good, WYSIWYG, HTML5 DTD-compliant editors -- which are virtually non-existent. I suspect it will happen eventually as the industry moves towards primarily delivering epub files rather than paper (as epub format is a containerized, DRM-enabled version of HTML5/CSS3), but it's still a long way off (years to decades).
]]>I will note that revision control is a very minor consideration in trade fiction publishing.
95% of books have a single author. Of those books, probably 99% go through writing/editing/revision stages, but only one person works on the file at a time -- the workflow is strictly linear. There might be forks for different edits in UK/USA context, but that mostly only happens in children's/young adult lit these days -- adults in the UK are expected to be okay reading US grammar/spelling. It might in future be useful to support forks for translations, but in general translation rights are sold to local publishers and the translation process is effectively the creation of an entirely new book in a different language: there's no continuity. Finally, there might be fixes for typos/bugs in the text (previously, only when a book went from hardcover to mass market; these days it's both easier and harder to fix typos in an ebook). But overall, the process is usually entirely linear: rcs or sccs are massive overkill in terms of the functionality they provide for novel publishing.
]]>Someone (or some piece of software) is being hlepful when they over-anticipate a requirement you have and attempt to help you achieve it by offering counterproductive or just plain irritating advice or services.
Example: if you announce on Facebook that you've been diagnosed with some chronic illness, a whole bunch of your FB-friends will exhibit hlepfulness by pointing you at crank diets, herbal remedies (which may or may not work), or homeopathic solutions. Usually without actually understanding the nature of your condition.
Another example: you ask how to compose a style sheet in Nisus Writer, and a bunch of folks hlepfully explain how to do it in Microsoft Word (which you do not own).
]]>Is there a version that will run on a modern PC? I ask because a friend created a lot of support materials for our shared RPG campaign, using it back when we both had XP boxes. It seems impossible to get it to work on any of the later windoze releases though.
Alternatively, does anyone know about some conversion tools that can port data from SmartSuite files to something a bit more generic?
]]>e.g. "That's not helpful, it's just helpy."
]]>"I need to do A, B and C. I have D, E and F." "Oh, you totally don't want to use F, you must be an idiot to use that. I use G, H and I. Much better."
G, H and I are incompatible with C, and don't work too well with A or B.
]]>If you want to wander the less legal download sources, you might still be lucky, but can you trust them?
LibreOffice certainly was able to read .lwp files at version 4.0.1 It took me a while to find one of my old data files to check, but it did open.
Open Office does not seem to support the format.
]]>I felt closest to it with 5.1 on the Mac.
But I use the current version on Win7 very happily.
Intellectually I understand some of the criticisms here, but as a user (and ex-professional journalist), it does it for me.
Different strokes etc.
]]>Your best bet is probably a temporary install on an XP box and convert the docs to another filetype. There are still plenty of XP machines in use, so you're bound to know somebody who has one.
]]>But Word is ugly, unreliable, cumbersome, and prone to sulking. The bad news is that most other editors are nearly the same, especially those which try to mimic Word.
The good news is that HTML5 (and/or/EPUB3) is going to be the file format which will save humanity*, so expect to see a lot of editors start offering it, including (eventually) Word. This won't make the interface any better, or get rid of change tracking, but some added competition might make Microsoft look again at that thing called Usability.
-- * For some value of "humanity". And some value of "save".
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