Re: Generating PDFs with Ada

[Adam Beneschan <adam@irvine.com>]

On Jan 11, 10:41 am, Ludovic Brenta <ludo...@ludovic-brenta.org>
wrote:
> Adam Beneschan writes:
> > On Jan 11, 12:51 am, Stephen Leake <stephen_le...@stephe-leake.org>
> > wrote:
>
> >> > As long as we're on sort of a similar subject, I've wondered several
> >> > times if there are Ada libraries for creating Microsoft Word
> >> > documents.
>
> >> I hope not :)
>
> > Why?  (Maybe I shouldn't pursue this, but I've gotten curious about
> > what the thinking is behind this sort of answer.)
>
> Because Microsoft Word is proprietary and uses a non-standard,
> proprietary and ever-changing format (think "planned obsolescence").
> Even the more recent so-called "Open XML" format contains many parts
> that are not in the public spec, making it anything but "open".
>
> You are a proponent of Ada.  One of the selling points of the language
> is that it is not only an official ISO standard but an open one at that.
> Microsoft formats are neither official ISO standards nor open.

So what?  Does "being a proponent of Ada" necessarily imply "being a
proponent of users ditching all their proprietary, non-ISO, non-open
stuff and changing their entire computing environment to fit some
'openness' paradigm"?  I sure don't see it.

There are a lot of Windows users out there.  There are Ada compilers
targeted to Windows (or do you object to that?).  Many of those
Windows users use tools like Microsoft Office.  Do you believe that
the Ada community should tell them, "Sorry, those tools aren't based
on ISO standards, so Ada isn't for you"?  I thought we were trying to
encourage the spread of the Ada language.  And I'm sure there are
other tools out there (besides MS Office) that generate .doc files.
Do we intend to tell those tools' authors, "Ada would be a great
language for writing your tool--it would make your tool more robust
and easier to maintain--but we don't want you to use it because you're
generating something that has a proprietary format, so please use C++
instead"?  Why???

As for Microsoft using a "non-standard, proprietary and ever-changing
format", there seems to be some format information available at

http://www.microsoft.com/interop/docs/officebinaryformats.mspx

How often this changes, I don't know, but they do have an interest in
keeping things compatible, so something written according to this
format would (I would think) work with any version of Microsoft Word
for a number of years, at least, even if the format specification
doesn't include all the latest features.  (I notice that it's a
specification for .doc files but there may not a public one
for .docx).  Still, I think that, at least hypothetically, this format
information could be used to write a useful tool that generates a Word
file, if one decided that it was necessary.

It may be that the need for writing a Word document is small enough
that nobody has considered it worth their while to write a library
like that.  I can accept that as a reason.  But the attitude that I
thought I detected---"I hope [that nobody writes a library like
that]"---is not one that I believe serves the Ada community.  I
apologize if I read too much into anything anyone said.

                                     -- Adam