\centerline{\bf SGML Users' Group Meeting}
\medskip
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A meeting of the {\sc sgml} Users' Group took
place at the British Standards Institution in London time
on January 11th, 1988. It was informative with software demonstrations
taking place at the back of the room in the break periods.

{\sc  sobemap} products were presented by Joan Smith and
Jean-Pierre Gaspart, introducing new releases of the
full features parser, as well as new products
destined to enter the marketplace. Among these were
an interactive editor intended as an authoring tool,
a formatter, and a graphical editor. This last product would enable document
type definitions ({\sc dtd}s) to be represented graphically,
and also {\sc sgml} databases. In this way hypertext
applications would become possible. If you have an {\sc ibm}
or compatible pc, and are at a university (or other educational
institution), {\sc sobemap} will make the parser
available free of charge for teaching or basic research.
More details of this offer are given in the next article.


Martin Bryan of Quorum followed with
a very practical look at {\sc sgml} from typesetting markup
through to {\sc sgml} itself, listing
the advantages of going to {\sc sgml}. His advice was to
take a simple
starting point, using no more than twenty tags to markup a manual, treating
tables, figures, and other exotic elements as externals.
The main advantage of {\sc sgml} was its rigour, checking the document
against its previously formulated description.

Elsevier is already taking the {\sc sgml} route. Jan Bleeker
described a study carried out prior to their
adoption of the standard. A start has been made with bibliographic data and
abstracts, and there are plans for electronic document delivery and
making the publication process electronic, in addition to the
availability of information through a database host for the provision of secondary
services.

A parser under consideration by Elsevier was that developed at the
Free University of Amsterdam. The author of this, Jos Warmer, spoke
of its capabilities --- it is for basic {\sc sgml} and has been tailored
to the Elsevier {\sc dtd}. Next on his wish list is an interactive
editor, within a two-year timescale.

Mike Cowlishaw of {\sc ibm} rounded off the day with a very professional
presentation of {\sc  lexx}, the structured editor developed whilst
he was seconded to the New Oxford English Dictionary project. The
examples were illustrated in glorious technicolour as
he gave a slide show on the capabilities of the editor. The snag is
that you need a blue mainframe for this product.

The next meeting of the Group is April 11th, again
at the {\sc bsi} in London. All are welcome.

\rightline{\sl Joan Smith}