Re: Ada Reference Manual 2012 in info format

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

"Yannick Duchêne (Hibou57)" <yannick_duchene@yahoo.fr> writes:

> Le Fri, 04 May 2012 09:58:34 +0200, Stephen Leake
> <stephen_leake@stephe-leake.org> a écrit:
>>> Small steps..
>>
>> Reformatting the entire ARM is _not_ a small effort!
>>
>> Perhaps you could spend that energy improving the Ada Programming
>> wikibook, instead?
>
> I feel some low level reformatting may be as much worth as a
> contribution to the Ada wikibook: a DITA formated ARM may be the best
> option among all.  

(I assume you mean this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_Information_Typing_Architecture)

It should be possible to write some Ada code so arm_form can transform
the Scheme to DITA, just as it now outputs texinfo format.

That does seem to be worth doing. Perhaps it would even be a good route
to PDF with hyperlinks!

I don't remember how long it took me to get texinfo output working; a
couple of months of occasional effort, I think.

DITA looks more complex, but if you understand the format, it should be
a similar effort.

> But they may be reasons we don't know for the source format to be what
> it actually is.

That's easy; apparently DITA was invented in 2001; the ARM scheme
sources were started for Ada 95 (if not earlier).

Also, Randy's Scheme format specifically supports multiple versions,
with change tracking, in one source. I've only skimmed the DITA table of
contents at
http://docs.oasis-open.org/dita/v1.1/CS01/archspec/archspec.html; you
might be able to do that in DITA source, but it's not obvious.

-- 
-- Stephe