

Ask HN: What kind of tools does Congress use to author 1,000+ page bills? - jonknee

Reading through the new 1,018 page healthcare bill got me wondering...  What kind of document authoring tool do our lawmakers use to generate these massive bills? Seems like they have to be written in parallel by lots of unnamed lawyers which would make it quite a task to get the final draft together.<p>Anyone have experience here?
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cpr
It probably doesn't matter how they're produced, since they're not designed to
be read--no one can possibly read large bills like these in time for a vote.

This is one of the major faults of our current legislative scheme: massive
bills that no one reads, but into which everyone throws his favorite pork.

It's a total disaster.

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eru
Perhaps reading out bills aloud before they are voted on would help? (Not that
law-makers would pay attention, but it would at least slow down the flood of
legislative text.)

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gaius
Interns. Lots and lots of interns.

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eru
Reminds me of the professor who admits that his favorite programming language
is `Ph.D. student'.

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jonknee
The PDF I have was generated by Acrobat Distiller and looks like the source
was an XML file... Wondering how they create that XML file.

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gaius
On a more serious note:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Generalized_Markup_Language>

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DanielStraight
/dev/random

Maybe with some Markov chains thrown in for good measure.

