Re: Generating PDFs with Ada

["Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de>]

On Sun, 16 Jan 2011 15:33:25 +0000, Simon Wright wrote:

> "Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de> writes:
> 
>> On Sun, 16 Jan 2011 11:59:18 +0000, Simon Wright wrote:
>>
>>> Suppose we decide to have books with chapters with paragraphs. Are we
>>> going to say
>>> 
>>> <book>
>>>   <chapter>
>>>     <paragraph>
>>
>> Let's not. Documents have no such structure. When imposed on, this
>> structure makes usage of the documents very difficult. I have to work with
>> many documents on networking issues, they are mostly in PDF. These are
>> almost unusable *because* they are 1) in PDF, 2) structured as "books,"
>> which they are not, and never should have been.
>>
>> A hierarchy of text segments (chapter, paragraph etc) is a possible view of
>> the document, of which importance is quite minor and becoming more and more
>> negligible, because documents are never read sequentially. Document is not
>> a fiction novel. The structure of pages is also a view, a harmful view,
>> because pages have nothing to do either with the content or with the
>> rendering on the display.
> 
> Well, you've lost me there. If you had to write something on networking
> issues (I say 'something' because if you're going to chuck out book,
> chapter, paragraph etc you might as well go the whole hog and chuck out
> document too :) how would you structure it?

It should be an interlinked network of text pieces. Its representation
should depend on the current view, especially the order and the visibility
of its parts. Consider Ada's RM, ARM and the Rationale as one document. It
is impossible to have as a structure of chapters, it just does not work.
Further, text is not the only part of the document. There are links which
should be rendered in the text. They should also be rendered outside the
text as a graph, a cloud diagram, etc. There are bookmarks, history of text
navigation, history of document changes, readers comments etc.

You mentioned Wiki, which obviously is a far better presentation model or
electronic documentation than PDF. So far I saw no satisfactory ideas of
how computer-era documentation should be made.

-- 
Regards,
Dmitry A. Kazakov
http://www.dmitry-kazakov.de