Re: Ada Reference Manual 2012 in info format

[Stephen Leake <stephen_leake@stephe-leake.org>]

"Nasser M. Abbasi" <nma@12000.org> writes:

> On 5/10/2012 2:21 AM, Dmitry A. Kazakov wrote:
>> On Wed, 9 May 2012 20:42:56 -0500, Randy Brukardt wrote:
>>
>>> Anyway, enough griping. I'm interested in concrete suggestions that can be
>>> implemented (not to promise that they would be). But be aware that I don't
>>> have much budget for RM work at this point, so I can't promise anything.
>>
>
>> I would lump everything in just one HTML page. Index and contents could be
>> in a separate frame, but not really necessary.
>>
>
> Why not use Latex? 

For what? 

If you mean "rewrite the original Scheme sources in Latex", that will
never happen.

1) read the Scheme (available at
http://www.stephe-leake.org/ada/arm_info-20120428-src.tar.gz)

2) there is a _lot_ more information in the Scheme than in a typical
Latex document. Three date versions: 1995, 2005, 2012. Two complexity
versions: ARM, Annotated ARM.

3) It would take way too much time to verify that the translation is
_perfect_

4) it would significantly change the layout.

> Then you get the full 30 years of latex scientific publication tools
> that Latex has, with all the indexing, table of contents,
> bibliography, page numbers, cross referneces, 

Already have all that. Yes, it was partly re-inventing the wheel, but it
was for good reasons.

It _might_ have made sense for someone very familiar with Latex, and
able to write complex Latex macros, to write the ARM in Latex starting
in 1983. But they didn't, and we have a working system, so there's no
reason to change it now.

> tables, figure, graphics, etc.. 

None of those appear in the current ARM; why are they needed?

> and zillions of latex packages that comes with it for free.

ditto.

> Then use Latex2html to convert everything to HTML. 

Have you actually compared the current HTML to Latex2html output? I
suspect the current HTML is much better (I have never used Latex2html; I
have used makeinfo to convert texinfo source to html; the result is
pretty horrible, although functional).

Is there an example of Latex2HTML output somewhere accessible? I'd like
to see it.

> Use pdflatex to generate PDF, generate .ps etc... all from the SAME
> plain text source files. see

Already have that; why does it need to change? Well, it might get
hyperlinks in the PDF; that would be good.

Note that you did not mention 'generate xml', which might be
interesting. Is there an xml backend for Latex? I have not heard of one.

I tried to add an arm_form option to generate Latex, so I could get PDF
with hyperlinks. It proved difficult; the semantic mismatch between the
Scheme and Latex was too large (which would also be a problem in manual
translation). I suspect it would be easier to generate PDF directly,
although that would mean implementing a paragraph fill algorithm.

Randy produces the PDF with Microsoft Word RTF as an intermediate; my
package produces PDF with texinfo as an intermediate. Randy's PDF is
much nicer, but neither has hyperlinks. 

> I do not know why any one will choose a different tool
> to publish anything. It is all there ;)

Time to learn! go read the Scheme source, and try to translate one small
file into Latex.

I am a big fan of Latex; I use it for all of my documents. But writing
new macros in it is a _pain_; the core language is just weird, most
existing macros are very poorly documented, and trying to read the
source code for them makes my head ache. You would need several new,
complex macros to attempt to translate the full ARM Scheme into Latex.

Since Randy writes both the Scheme and the arm_form Ada code that
processes, he can make it do _exactly_ what is needed, and can easily
understand the total system. That is a _Huge_ advantage over Latex.

arm_form was written for a very specific purpose; to format the various
versions of the ARM. It could be used for similar docs, such as the C++
standard (although the code might object :). There is no need for a
general purpose document prep system for the ARM.

-- 
-- Stephe