-------------------- INFO RE: RAINBOW "PUBLICITY" -------------------- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ FEATURE ARTICLE IN January 1994 issue Title: Accelerating Conversion to SGML via the Rainbow Format Author: David Sklar Describes the motivation behind the Rainbow effort. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ MISINFORMATION ABOUT RAINBOW IS BEING PROLIFERATED ON THE NET Some anonymous talk on the Internet about Rainbow is promoting misinformation. The following *inaccurate* news item appeared on the Internet: Electronic Book Technologies, Inc. (Providence, RI) has announced a "Rainbow" format and software that will convert most proprietary word-processor formats to a canonical, well-documented SGML format. This insulates publishers from updates to commercial word-processing software. Rainbow SGML may then be converted into the richer SGML structures (or Document Type Definitions) required by proprietary publishing tools. EBT's DynaText, for instance, converts SGML texts to dynamic electronic books. FTP the Rainbow DTD and Rainbow Makers from pub/outgoing/rainbow on ftp.ebt.com, or contact rainbow@ebt.com to subscribe to update notifications. Unfortunately, this article (by an unknown author) has created misconceptions about the Rainbow effort. Let us clarify important facts about the Rainbow effort: 1. Rainbow is an *idea* and a publicly available DTD that implements that idea. Rainbow is not a software product and is not currently affiliated with any commercial effort. 2. EBT is providing a small set of Rainbow Makers as a means of "jump starting" the community of Rainbow users, but EBT is not committed to developing fully-supported Rainbow Maker products. EBT plans to make Rainbow-Maker source code available so members of the Rainbow user community can take over maintenance. It is our hope that the Rainbow user community will independently create and share Rainbow Makers freely via the Internet.