Re: Generating PDFs with Ada

["Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com>]

"Ludovic Brenta" <ludovic@ludovic-brenta.org> wrote in message 
news:87lj2rgkaz.fsf@ludovic-brenta.org...
...
>> And I'm sure there are other tools out there (besides MS Office) that
>> generate .doc files.
>
> Apart from Microsoft's own, I can't think of any such tool.  Then again,
> I don't use office software much, I don't use Windows, and I would
> certainly not use, much less buy, a tool that locks my data into a
> proprietary format like .doc.  Maybe that's because I'm a software
> engineer and not a lemming :)

You're not trying very hard. :-)
OpenOffice produces .doc files. I think most of the web-based "office 
suites" also do. All for pragmatic reasons.

I've tried to take the attitude you are espousing and it has proven 
completely impractical. I've tried distributing documents in .odf format 
(the supposedly open format of OpenOffice) and hardly anyone seemed to be 
happy. It's a lot easier to distribute in .doc format (although I try to 
distribute read-only documents as .PDF).

...
>> 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.
>
> Like Stephe, I too hope that nobody writes a library that helps generate
> .doc files.  My reason reason is that such a tool would endorse the
> proprietary format and help continue the dominance of evil proprietary
> formats against standard ones.  The same tool could be just as useful
> writing PDF, DocBook, OpenDocument or even Plain Text instead of any
> version of .doc.  Software engineers should promote standards whenever
> possible, whatever language they use.

I think the "library" should be able to generate any kind of file that you 
want. The ARM_Formatter uses an O-O design which allows plugging in any kind 
of output that you might dream up. So long as the clients write to that 
interface (and there is no alternative!), any sort of output can be made.

Personally, I wouldn't want to try to directly create PDF files, because 
that would require doing detailed character layout, justification, 
pagination, indexing, table of contents, and the like. Doing these properly 
is a very complex job (I have experience with writing programs to output via 
typesetters back when I was much younger, and this is very difficult to get 
right). That's why I use MS Word and/or OpenOffice as an intermediary for 
creating the Ada standard and lots of other documents. If I was starting 
that today I would write directly to the .ODF format and let OpenOffice do 
all of the work (but that wasn't an option in 1998).

                                             Randy.