Re: Offlang suggestion & counterproposal

> Van: Christophe Grandsire
>
> Basically, I said that I agreed the basic arguments against an official
club,
> except that I found Jan being more frightened by the word itself than by
the
> thing, since what he proposed was basically the activities of a club, but
> without giving it such a name (just like some people are afraid to use the
> word "hobby" because it would allegedly have some negative connotations...
:)) ).

Well, just to put the record straight, I am not in favor, nor against, an
"official" club. I merely wanted to point out what the advantages and
disadvantages of both options would be. The thing which is much more
important is what activities do we want to organize (conventions, dinner
meetings, publish a real/electronic magazine etc). Once this has been
established, then you decide what the best form for the organziation is: for
dinner parties, you only need ad hoc initiative or someone who makes a "list
of turns" of participating dutch members. For an online magazine, you need
an editorial staff of some people (who can be from anywhere) and someone who
is in charge (otherwise, nothing gets done, because either everybody waits
until someone else says something, or everybody starts doing the same things
simultaneously. Trust me, I have tons of experience with such kind of
organizations). For organizing a convention, you should found a corporate
body, with a board and statutes. SO it all depends on what we want, so we
should decide that first.

Personally, I like conlang dinner meetings, and I wouldn't be opposed to
co-organizing a convention, but I have no interest in a magazine, because I
already have enough to read, and I prefer activities where I meet people in
real life.

> As for the format of this journal itself, I thought HTML was too
restritive for
> our purpose, but PDF would fit the requirements of electronic sending,
platform
> independence, and the need for a good looking thing when printed :)) (and
since
> it wouldn't be meant for web publishing - despite Maarten's opinion about
> PDF :)) -, it wouldn't be a problem). The only problem would be
> the format of the articles when sent.
A good editorial staff should allow multiple input formats. Writers should
worry about writing content, editors should worry about formats.

> I consider Word to be a bad solution, since the different versions of Word
are not even compatible (despite
> Microsoft's claims) and it's extremely difficult to manipulate big files
with Word, and to put
> different files together without making a mess. My best shot would be to
do
> like "serious" journals: using LaTeX.
That would seriously diminish the flow of interesting articles send to the
magazine. You should leave the format open or at least restrict it to a list
of popular formats (Word, HTML, LateX, RTF).

> Despite its frightening looks, LaTeX is nearly as easy as HTML
You consider HTML easy? Trust me, for many people HTML is a problem not to
be overcome in a lifetime.

> (and I can make it easier by creating a special "conlang-article" package
that I would send to people
> who want to write an  article) as
> long as you don't want to make a fancy presentation (and we don't want to
do
> that in this case :)) ), cross-platform compatible, extremely stable when
> handling long files, allows extremely easily inclusion of new parts in a
file,
> and easily converted to PDF (I can do it myself).
The magazine now starts to sound like a simply laid out composition of
rather long articles. I do not see the benefit of that. I always skip the
long posts on the list. What you propose is not "editing" it is merely
"collecting" articles. A good magazine requires as much time beign put
together as it takes writing the actual content.

Maarten

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