Re: Ada e-books

[Steve Johnson <steve@cunningsystems.com>]

On Thursday, November 19, 2015 at 1:41:48 AM UTC-8, Serge Robyns wrote:
>
> I did indeed find the LRM e-book and this is why I've been asking for the 2012 AARM (I'll add 2A's to avoid confusion).  I'm interested in the annotated version in e-book format.
> [...]
> I've tried to generate the RTF from the sources but somehow I only generated the 95 version, not the 2012.

After significant trial and error and poking in the source files (*.MSM plus 03A.MSS which was the cause of the major failure to build from current manual source), I've found the following solution which worked for me.  It may or may not be more fuss than you're willing to put up with at this point.

You may have got the manual source and prebuilt windows tool from http://www.ada-auth.org/standards/ada12.html.  At least that's where I first found it.  Please note that the manual source linked there (ARM_SRC.zip) is much more current and incompatible with the latest prebuilt windows tool (2012-FRM.ZIP).  The simplest way around this issue (assuming that you're on a windows machine in the first place) is to get a previous snapshot, i.e. 2012-SRC.ZIP which should work (it did for me) with with 2012-FRM.ZIP tool.  Alternatives would include building the current tools from source or hacking/patching 03A.MSM to remove the items tripping up the original 2012 build tool.

The most convenient place to retrieve the snapshotted 2012-SRC.zip and 2012-FRM.zip files are at:
   http://www.ada-auth.org/arm-files/

Note that you will get the original version 0 output (i.e. Ada 95) if you don't specify a specific version and something other than "no-changes".  For Ada 2012, you want version 3.

So after creating an empty directory, unzipping both 2012-SRC.zip and 2012-RM.zip into it, and creating an "ouput" subdirectory, you should be able to execute the following commands from the command prompt to produce RTF versions of the ARM (RM.RTF) and AARM (AA.RTF) in the ./output/ subdirectory:

C:\Users\Steve\AARM>arm_form rm rtf new-only 3
C:\Users\Steve\AARM>arm_form aarm rtf new-only 3

With Calibre a simple Add books and then Convert books should get you reasonable epubs.  Of course there are a number of options in the conversion process and you have the option of editing the RTF files (Word or Open/LibreOffice, etc.) before importing if you want.  Additionally there are options inside the original RM.MSM and AARM.MSM files.  You may find that the defaults produce acceptable output.

-Steve