PoO in the 1990s used BookMaster/BookManager, and that was very useful for looking up instructions, as one could for example simply OPEN the document to a specified mnemonic.
However, that form started to run into various problems, in particular the maximum of about 64K unique "words" in BookManager (which meant that some other IBM manuals had to be split into multiple volumes), and other limitations such as poor support for embedded graphics. Also, there were no "WYSIWYG" tools for BookMaster (or its internal successor, IBMIDDoc SGML), so the architects had to be familiar with BookMaster (which was becoming obsolete) and with the various named styles used to get the right formatting. Another major complication is that PoO needs a lot of conditional processing and merging support, as the changes start off as architecture revision documents which after review and approval are merged into the official documents (external and internal versions). The tool they adopted could handle that, with a WYSIWYG editor interface, and it continued to produce a similar PDF file merged up from the internal architecture documents. However, as the architecture grew, the tool had problems coping with the size and complexity, and it uses its own proprietary representation so it is not easy to extract the text for any other purpose. And although the export functions include "export as HTML", the output is missing a lot of information. Also, when I tried to create the web version I found that there were many places over the preceding years where people had updated the document so that it looked right on the screen and in the PDF but they did not use the official named styles, instead for example using specific basic text styles (italic, bold or underscore) or explicitly selected fonts instead. That makes it very difficult to convert it systematically, especially when some of the basic style information is missing from the exported HTML. Jonathan Scott -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Assembler List <[email protected]> On Behalf Of Seymour J Metz Sent: 20 June 2025 11:21 To: [email protected] Subject: Re: z17 PoO All of that would have been so much easier had IBM stuck with using an extendable markup language such as DCF/BookMaster/BookManager or LaTeX. -- Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz http://mason.gmu.edu/~smetz3 עַם יִשְׂרָאֵל חַי נֵ֣צַח יִשְׂרָאֵ֔ל לֹ֥א יְשַׁקֵּ֖ר
