| I know this is tangential, but I would love for someone to talk about writing a more visual type of book, full of images, tables and charts for the business world. A table like the one in the first screenshot of this post works well because the author is not repeatedly iterating on it, there's very little text and information flows top-to-bottom very neatly. That's great, but it's also extremely basic. Take a look at something like https://www.jpmorgan.com/jpmpdf/1320605428574.pdf and imagine writing that. How do you lay things out on a page? How do you make content fit a layout? There's no grid. The reality is people use PowerPoint to do that, but PowerPoint is a slide authoring tool that assumes you have a few bullets, maybe one or two images per slide. Dense presentations make its shortcomings obvious and quite painful. It boggles the mind that with all of the resources dumped into CSS/JS and web development in general, nobody has leveraged that experience to build an authoring tool that's 21st-century ready, with version control, with a clear separation but nonetheless linked relationship of raw data, actual content output and formatting and final publishing into PDF. What am I missing? EDIT: one more example for good measure https://www.jefferies.com/CMSFiles/Jefferies.com/files/W%201... |
Using Powerpoint, for every slide the author chose (potentially) a different Powerpoint template (2×1 columns, 2×2 etc). They have complete freedom to "break" the structure, such as with callouts pointing to the "other" column, images going beyond the margins.
A automatic template removes this flexibility, but allows scripting or rebuilding the document with different text/data. That's the compromize.
Remark.js achieves some of the most basic parts of this, but would need some fiddling to add some CSS grid support and/or default templates: https://remarkjs.com/ (Except for being ugly, http://mobmad.github.io/js-tdd-erfaringer/ shows some possible structure with Remark.js).