Panorama and SGML

[Earl Young]

I went to a "Panorama presentation" yesterday at the Canadian Embassy in 
Washington.  Panorama is made by Soft Quad - which is a Canadian firm - and they
were showing a US Department of Defense application.  Attendees included people 
from IBM, several major publishers, various DOD offices, and a collection of 
consultants.  The Chairman and the major technical people from SoftQuad were 
also there.

There was a roundtable discussion after the presentation.  The summary is that 
Panorama works.

Panorama Pro - as distinct from the Panorama Viewer - works as either a 
standalone product or as an add-on the Netscape Navigator.  An Internet Explorer
version is imminent.  Panorama builds a page that resembles an HTML frames page 
- and the "frame" on the left is built dynamically according to the DTD.  
Clicking on the left frame takes you to the appropriate portion of the document 
- which by defauly displays on the right.  The left frame may be pushed out of 
the way if you need more space for the display on the right.

All told, the product is very impressive.  There were enough discussions about 
"tweaks" that people want to indicate that the assembled users had a lot of 
experience with the product.  Configuration issues were raised, and a Mac 
version was requested.  We do a lot of SGML work at BNA - lots of SGML work - 
and found the meeting to be very valuable.  I will let you know how the product 
works for us.

There is a difference between Panorama Pro and the viewer you can download from 
their site.  They are trying to generate revenue in order to support more 
development - like all other software firms - and we talked at length about 
their pricing model.  But I would caution against deciding about the product 
based on experience with only their "free, downloadable" viewer.  It is a niche 
product - designed to provide the ability to view SGML - but it does not have 
the flexibility of their Panorama Pro product.

SoftQuad also sells the Hot Metal Pro editor.  They appear to have their 
collective heads together in the area of making HTML and SGML work through 
browsers.

We do not run 3.1 on any of our development machines because most of the recent 
software demands at least 95.  The 3.1 configuration was discussed yesterday as 
an "annoyance" item - briefly.  Have you tried emailing SoftQuad about the 
problem?

Earl Young
______________________________ Reply Separator _________________________________
Subject: Re[2]: Panorama and SGML
Author:  steinkel at carlisle-emh2.army.mil at INTERNET
Date:    2/7/97 10:53 AM


     I have Panorama and Netscape (both 2 and 3) working together fine 
     under Win 3.X.  I believe both need to be running for everything to 
     work properly.
     
     
     Leland
     
     
______________________________ Reply Separator _________________________________
Subject: Re: Panorama and SGML
Author:  "Earl Young" <eayoung at bna.com> at INTERNET 
Date:    2/5/97 8:50 AM
     
     
     I have a full copy of the program - but haven't loaded it on my system 
     yet.  This is a good excuse to do so.  Please let me know a couple of 
     the URLs you are interested in testing it against, and by next Tuesday 
     or so I will have loaded Panorama and tested it against those sites.
     
     Earl Young
     
     
______________________________ Reply Separator _________________________________
Subject: Panorama and SGML
Author:  ewodar at unixg.ubc.ca at INTERNET 
Date:    2/4/97 3:25 AM
     
     
I tried sending this on Friday, with no apparent success.  Apologies in 
advance for any duplication....
     
**********************************************
     
Has anybody out there tried to use SoftQuad Panorama to read SGML documents 
on-line?
     
So far I have failed to get Panorama to work.  I downloaded it (the freeware 
version, that is) from the SoftQuad site, set it up on Windows 3.1, and 
configured Netscape 3.0 Gold to launch it when encountering an .sgml file. 
But whenever I try to follow a link to such a file, I get a series of 
on-screen error messages that tell me that PANORAMA.EXE has caused a general 
protection fault, etc.
     
I also tried configuring Netscape to download SGML files to my hard-drive, 
so that I could launch Panorama by itself and use it locally.  However, when 
I tried this, a message came on-screen saying that only Panorama *PRO* 
allows you to read SGML files from the hard-drive.
     
Any suggestions for getting Panorama to work the way it's supposed to would 
be most appreciated.
     
*************************************************************************** 
Erwin Wodarczak - Records Analyst / Archivist
UBC Library - Special Collections and University Archives Division 
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
URL: http://www.library.ubc.ca/spcoll/ 
E-mail: ewodar at unixg.ubc.ca
Tel: (604)822-5877   Fax: (604)822-9587
     
We do precision guesswork based on vague assumptions and unreliable data 
of dubious accuracy
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