darcusblog

Norm Walsh is mulling the choice for a new laptop: Linux, or OS X? Taking sensible advice, he’s narrowing the decision based on available applications.

As an OS X user, I can say the following about applications on the OS:

The Apple iLife applications are good, as is the bundled mail client. I find Keynote a good, if imperfect, presentation app (with an XML file format).

Browser support is quite good. Both Safari and Firefox are good free browsers that run well on the platform.

I use emacs regularly. On my laptop it runs smoothly with all of the extra packages I use. It’s a bit more unstable on my desktop machine, and I have no idea why that is. It’s a newer binary, so that may be it. But it also may be that the desktop OS was not clean installed, which has resulted in some strange behavior in places.

I have not had any significant problems running Java applications; everything from the eXist XML DB + Cocoon, to Trang and Saxon 8, to jEdit all run well.

OpenOffice support is one thing that does noticably lag behind support on Linux. I find NeoOffice/J good enough for my limited needs though.

Perl, Python and Ruby are all bundled, though not necessarily with the latest versions. I have not found it hard to upgrade when needed (with Ruby, for example). There are times when compiling C tools require some tweaks, but in general I’ve not had problems there either. And then there’s package management systems like Fink and DarwinPorts to make it even easier.

As for the hardware: I really love my iBook G4.

I’ve been asked a few times lately about my workflow. Answer:

I use nxml mode in emacs because I love RELAX NG, and nxml is good enough to have made me bite the bullet and learn emacs. I wish other editors had such fantastic xml support (as much as I otherwise like vim, I can’t take it seriously without much better xml editing support). Norm Walsh’s unicode entry package gets me automatic unicode smart quotes and em-dashes and such, and a menu item to insert more obscure characters. The emacs template package (and Mike Smith’s template menu) helps with creating new documents.

Schemas? I’m using a customized version of DocBook NG these days, with the new biblioref element, and MODS records embedded in the bibliography element. The MODS records are created in a variety of ways: converted from online databases using Bibutils, hand-coded using emacs/nxml, and in some cases generated from source docs using XSLT.

I have a custom annotation schema I use, and embed those records in the MODS extension element, or sometimes just have them as standalone records.

MODS records are stored in the eXist XML DB, and currently manually inserted into the document. I hope to see this change soon once someone (probably eXist author Wolfgang Meier) writes the XQuery code to run a document through it and automatically insert the MODS records.

Final output is created with homegrown XSLT 2.0 stylesheets.

I don’t use RefDB primarily because it does not yet support either the more detailed citation coding available in the new bibioref element (I cannot use a tool that does not support point citation details, which are all over my documents), nor MODS. My bibliographic data is too critical to me to be comfortable trying to force it into RIS. I’m more comfortable working in MODS and dumping the records intact into the XML DB.

One thing about bibliographic formatting applications like Endnote and BibTeX that I always found limiting was that there was no way to seamlessly switch between footnote-style citations and author-year. Since Endnote is fundamentally tied to a bloated GUI word-processor, I suppose I could understand this. However, LaTeX and BibTeX are structured markup languages. So why commands lke footcite?

Note: this is not some idle concern. In my area of the academy, some journals use one style (endnote), and most use the other (author-year).

In an effort to prove my thesis that it is possible to code citations completely independent of such presentational details, I’ve been able to come up with these results, each from the same DocBook NG and MODS source: author-year and footnote.

It still needs work, but I think it proves the point well-enough. The examples also prove my argument that bibtex-like record typing is unncessary to format bibliographic and citations, except around the edges.

Oh, another presentational structure common in even XML dialectics like DocBook that bears rethinking: footnote.