Re: Generating PDFs with Ada

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

Randy Brukardt wrote on comp.lang.ada:
> It would be useful to note that .rtf files are less stable than .doc files.
> We continued to have bizarre formatting problems with the Ada standard until
> someone noticed that they went away if we took the .rtf files and resaved
> them as .doc files. Moreover, an attempt to save the files as .rtf crashes
> Word (all versions that I've tried). But even with those problems, it's a
> whole lot easier to write .rtf and generate .pdf from that than to try to do
> it in one step.
>
> Moreover, that allows the input to the formatter to be plain text, with all
> of the version control advantages that entails. (And version control is very
> important for a large, long-lived document like the Ada standard.) And it
> allows the creation of multiple related documents (RM and AARM) from a
> single source base. And we can also automatically create some of the annexes
> from the source (like the attribute, pragma, and syntax annexes).

I see we're on the same wavelength as regards professional document
management: plain text, version control, separation of style from
content, etc.

Personally I would have chosen Texinfo, TeX, LaTeX or DocBooc instead
of RTF.  These formats are not ISO standards but they are stable and
open.  It is possible that generating HTML and PDF from such sources
was not yet an option in 1998, though.

--
Ludovic Brenta.