Rethinking
The Academy:Rethinking
The Academy:Electronic documents may or may not be hypertextual: they are texts that are primarily distributed via electronic means or on portable media. Thus, electronic texts could be created in Word and read with a Word Viewer, or such formats as .pdf for Acrobat Reader, or, of course, distributed via the Internet.
For example, this hypertext was initially produced in Word using Internet Assistant, Microsoft's add-on to Word that allows it to convert Word .doc files directly to HTML, and then transferred to my website via FTP.
In another example, The University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) has produced a toolkit with links to its computer resources for those using Microsoft's new operating system, the Windows 95 Network Services Kit. Its documentation, primarily intended for distribution as .pdf (Acrobat files), includes hypertext links from a table of contents to the various help files. In this case, however, and for a number of technical reasons, the .pdfs lack a great deal of hypertext links.
Very generally speaking, the semi-automatic production of electronic texts (unlike the production of print texts for which very sophisticated tools exist) is still largely in development.
For instance, the current version of Internet Assistant is limited: it allows a writer to produce straight-forward basic HTML in a very short period of time. However, the latest version cannot yet handle complicated HTML tags like frames or tables. No doubt just as word processors developed in complexity and ability, so will tools for creating various forms of electronic texts.
Last Modified: August 2, 1996
Copyright © 1996 by Keith Dorwick
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