Re: Generating PDFs with Ada

[Ludovic Brenta <ludovic@ludovic-brenta.org>]

Randy Brukardt wrote on comp.lang.ada:
> "Ludovic Brenta" <ludo...@ludovic-brenta.org> wrote in message
>
> news:87lj2rgkaz.fsf@ludovic-brenta.org...
> ...
>
>>> And I'm sure there are other tools out there (besides MS Office) that
>>> generate .doc files.
>
>> Apart from Microsoft's own, I can't think of any such tool.  Then again,
>> I don't use office software much, I don't use Windows, and I would
>> certainly not use, much less buy, a tool that locks my data into a
>> proprietary format like .doc.  Maybe that's because I'm a software
>> engineer and not a lemming :)
>
> You're not trying very hard. :-)
> OpenOffice produces .doc files. I think most of the web-based "office
> suites" also do. All for pragmatic reasons.

OK.  The reason I forgot about them is because I was thinking of
automated document generation, but your point is valid.

> I've tried to take the attitude you are espousing and it has proven
> completely impractical. I've tried distributing documents in .odf format
> (the supposedly open format of OpenOffice) and hardly anyone seemed to be
> happy. It's a lot easier to distribute in .doc format (although I try to
> distribute read-only documents as .PDF).

Yes, in my experience .PDF is the way to go. I generally *don't* want
people to change the documents I send them anyway.

> I think the "library" should be able to generate any kind of file that you
> want. The ARM_Formatter uses an O-O design which allows plugging in any kind
> of output that you might dream up. So long as the clients write to that
> interface (and there is no alternative!), any sort of output can be made.

Again, this argument is technically valid.  But if you're going to
generate documents, it is better to generate them in a standard format
over a non-standard one.

> Personally, I wouldn't want to try to directly create PDF files, because
> that would require doing detailed character layout, justification,
> pagination, indexing, table of contents, and the like. Doing these properly
> is a very complex job (I have experience with writing programs to output via
> typesetters back when I was much younger, and this is very difficult to get
> right). That's why I use MS Word and/or OpenOffice as an intermediary for
> creating the Ada standard and lots of other documents. If I was starting
> that today I would write directly to the .ODF format and let OpenOffice do
> all of the work (but that wasn't an option in 1998).

I agree that typesetting is difficult.  That's why I recommend using
typesetting programs to do that job.  Word processors are generally
bad at handling automatically generated input.  My preferred way would
be to generate TeX, LaTeX or DocBook and use the appropriate system do
the typesetting for me.

--
Ludovic Brenta.