From: wirzeniu@klaava.Helsinki.FI (Lars Wirzenius) Subject: Re: Annoying Documentation Date: 14 Jan 1993 09:13:38 GMT
john.will@satalink.com (John Will) writes:
>Come on, I was going to let this conversation pass, but this is a pretty
>stupid comment! It's trivial to format plain ASCII with a table of
>contents, headers, page numbers, and consistent margins!
Excuse me? How do I get a table of contents (and index, headings,
footnotes, and so on) when the ascii file has no markup information?
Automatically, that is, unless _you_ are the one who commits to doing
all the formatting by hand.
If, however, you agree on marking the section headings and other stuff
so that you can get the table of contents automatically, guess what
you have then? Yup, something not quite unlike LaTeX, or *roff.
>Documentation in the MS-DOS world has been done in shareware and
>freeware packages for years with nicely formatted ASCII
>documentation,
Nicely formatted my... They seldom print correctly on my printer (a
dot matrix printer) since they are formatted for a different paper
size, just to start with. They do not print out very nicely on a
laser printer, since the same copy has to be usable on all printers.
Besides, do you _really_ think the authors actually wrote the ascii
document by hand? Isn't there any chance that they might have, gasp,
used some tool to produce the formatted ascii version? Hey, in that
case they are just like us, except that we provide the source code for
the document as well (so that you can format it differently if you
want).
>This is as bad as MicroSoft distributing all their stuff in Word for
>Windows format, and many people have the same problem with that.
Hardly. The tools to format *roff and (La)TeX format documents are
all freely available. There are tools to convert them to plain ascii,
also freely available.
Most of the existing documentation is either in *roff, LaTeX, or
Texinfo (==TeX for hardcopy) format, and it will stay that way unless
somebody will do the conversions (again, and again, when the original
changes). New stuff that the doc project produces will probably be in
LaTeX format (each author decides for himself), but will be available
in several different formatted formats as well. Everbody will just
have to live with this, or do the work themselves (or try to convince
us to us plain ascii, not bloody likely).
I will ignore this thread from now on: it's not worth the time it
takes to discuss it further.