Date: Sun, 20 Nov 94 01:43:18 JST
From: Stephen Turnbull <turnbull AT shako DOT sk DOT tsukuba DOT ac DOT jp>
To: djgpp AT sun DOT soe DOT clarkson DOT edu
Subject: Tex etc (info file modes)

Marty Leisner said:

   A postscript copy is very useful...sometime earlier in the year
   I had problems texing the manual on a unix system, and a postscript
   copy was the solution (it worked for somebody).

   Why don't we put a postscript copy of simtel?

Well, Kent Dolan (see his reply) will probably come and change one bit
in every byte in your BIOS ROM to punish you for 'doc bloat'.

and Howard Kaikow <kaikow AT standards DOT com> said (at somewhat greater length)

   I have dealt with the international standards community for many
   years (and I have the scars to show it). Making documents available
   in a form that can be used by all has no 100% solution. In any

Hear, hear.

   RTF can be input by Word, WordPerfect, etc. I believe that there
   are LaTeX to RTF converter, I'm not sure about Tex to RTF. Making
   the documents available in RTF, as well as TeX, could make most
   people happy.

What's RTF?  An abbreviation for RTFM?  An acronym of "Really Trivial
Format" (aka ISO-8859-1 aka Latin-1 aka ASCII)?  The (very secondary)
issue is that it is not TeX->nantoka or LaTeX->kantoka, it's
TeXInfo->whatever.  TeXInfo is not exactly TeX or LaTeX and it will
drive any naive program bats because it mucks with the character
classes.  (For those of you who don't TeX, most TeX docs use '\' to
begin a macro name; TeXInfo uses '@'.  Trust me, there's a good reason
for this, besides confusing you, as well as autotranslator proggies.)

The *primary* issue is maintenance of these docs.  WHO IS GOING TO DO
IT?  Everybody thinks that the more people who can learn DJGPP the
better, and therefore we should put the docs into Postscript,
WordPerfect, Big-5, Shift-JIS, Hangul, and Swahili (SO THERE you
IndoEuropean BIGOTS!)  No disagreement on that, from anybody, except a
few TeX bigots who think the great unwashed majority of WYSIWYG (does
that stand for "Woah!  Your Sodden Idiotic Wording Yells Garbage"?)
need to be "encouraged" to learn TeX.  (I think I'm talking about me! :)

On several occasions people have put (some or all of) the docs into
(a) Postscript (b) Unix man page (c) ?roff (d) HTML (e) Windowze Help
formats.  None of these formats are as yet available for 1.12, 'cause
the hardworking volunteers who did them in the past didn't repeat it.
This kind of thing is *not* easy to automate.  At least, those folks
who claim to have automated them haven't published their programs.

DGJPP 2.0, we all devoutly hope, will be here in first quarter '95.  I
bet the people who are asking for the docs in different formats now
will be back again in March, still speaking in nasal tones an octave
above their normal range.  I can hear them now: "But now, with no
GO32, things are really changed and we really need the docs translated
into Innuit Word-for-Widgets."

TeXInfo, on the other hand, is available for free, and *will be
available for the foreseeable future of GNU C/C++* because that's FSF
policy and the FSF devotes substantial resources to maintaining those
docs.

That's my second to last word on the subject.

My last word is, at the moment I don't have space for gzip'ped
postscript versions of the docs on my server, so don't bother to
upload them there yet.  But *if* anybody actually *does* something
about reformatting the docs, you are more than welcome to send me mail
(turnbull AT shako DOT sk DOT tsukuba DOT ac DOT jp), and I will remove the useless GIFs
that are cluttering my disk and make space for the DJGPP docs.  Then
you can upload the reformatted docs via anonymous FTP to /incoming on
turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp.  I will then put them in /pub/djgpp/docs
where anybody who wants them can get them.  I would also really REALLY
love sources for automated scripts / programs to do the conversions.

Caveat:  if someone actually does upload docs to my server, of course
I will then have another word, for the announcement of availability.  OK?

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|                           Stephen Turnbull                            |
|     University of Tsukuba, Institute of Socio-Economic Planning       |
|          Tennodai 1-chome 1--1, Tsukuba, Ibaraki 305 JAPAN            |
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|                                                                       |
|                Founder and CEO, Skinny Boy Associates                 |
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