Re: Generating PDFs with Ada

["Elias Salomão Helou Neto" <eshneto@gmail.com>]

> Interestingly, the *actual* format that the Ada standards have been
> submitted in has been .PDF. Although ISO recently tried to again insist on
> all documents being in their own closed template for Microsoft Office and in
> .Doc files. Which only works with US versions of Office. What's
> "International" about that?? Anyway, that has again been beaten back - the
> supposed reason that they wanted to do this is so that they could modify the
> standards if they needed to do so. But editors don't want ISO secretaries
> mucking with their standards! What a wonderful way to have a disaster
> (imagine deleting "not" from some text).

I fail to understand how come public institutions use proprietary
formats for their document exchanges. There should be a law against
it. I get sick whenever I get a .doc file to fill in. If it is
possible I return it to the sender asking for a PDF form instead.

With .tex, changing the formatting of the whole document is a breeze.
And it can be done without even having access to the contents files,
perfect for ISO editors. Creating hyperlinked summaries, indices and
bibliographies is as easy as 1,2,3. Not to mention vector graphics
(can you even consider doing that with, say, .rtf?), math formulas and
so on.

Now, for automatic document generation, both from practical and
technical viewpoints, there is no chance for .rtf/.doc/.odt
against .tex as an intermediate format for generating .pdf. Sorry if
this will sound a little bit harsh, but anyone who would choose one of
the three former against the latter, simply doesn't know what is
doing. Anything that can be done by .rtf/.doc/.odt can be done with
LaTeX, but the opposite is just not true.

If you intend to get to pdf through an intermediate format, tex is
just the way to go.

>"The point of the XML-based Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA)
>  is to create modular technical documents that are easy to reuse with
>  varied display and delivery mechanisms, such as helpsets, manuals,
>  hierarchical summaries for small-screen devices, and so on."

I have never heard about DITA before, but I must mention that there is
nothing book-centric about TeX itself, therefore your objection
clearly does not apply here. TeX is about beautiful typesetting and it
is a fully fledged macro language, so you can get about anything you
want from it.

Elias