Re:The Absolute Denial of Shit
by specialist on Thursday July 19, 2018 @08:05AM
(#17565479)
Continuing your point...
Fonts and rendering and apps will change just like compilers and source and runtimes. aka bit rot.
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Want to preserve your output? Then print to PDF with embedded fonts. Or use screenshots.
Want to be able to recreate your output? Then treat your content like devs treat their software.
I used to write prepress and print manufacturing software. I also did a tour of duty as our tech writer. Our team's entire publishing workflow got a lot more sane when I treated it like any other dev task.
Make dependencies explicit, use source control, pin down versions of apps, drivers, fonts, OSes, etc (aka colophon).
Our "build servers" even had VMware images, containing our desktop publishing apps, used to automate PostScript, PDF, and web output.
(This is long before Chef & Ansible, CI/CD, etc. Kids today have no idea how good they got it.)
Fonts and rendering and apps will change just like compilers and source and runtimes. aka bit rot.
---
Want to preserve your output? Then print to PDF with embedded fonts. Or use screenshots.
Want to be able to recreate your output? Then treat your content like devs treat their software.
I used to write prepress and print manufacturing software. I also did a tour of duty as our tech writer. Our team's entire publishing workflow got a lot more sane when I treated it like any other dev task.
Make dependencies explicit, use source control, pin down versions of apps, drivers, fonts, OSes, etc (aka colophon).
Our "build servers" even had VMware images, containing our desktop publishing apps, used to automate PostScript, PDF, and web output.
(This is long before Chef & Ansible, CI/CD, etc. Kids today have no idea how good they got it.)