Re: Generating PDFs with Ada

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

"Maciej Sobczak" <see.my.homepage@gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:a646191e-6671-4c3a-ab9a-ba20d4bba9bf@r29g2000yqj.googlegroups.com...
>On Jan 11, 9:51 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 :)
>
>Without getting involved into the discussion that follows, I would
>propose everybody to read this:
>
>http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/02/19.html
>
>The most important part starts with "Let Office do the heavy work for
>you", but the whole article is worth reading.

It's nice to see that his conclusion is the same as mine. I find the 
suggestion to use .rtf more compelling than "let Office do the work for you" 
simply because not everyone has Office installed. (I don't on my newer 
computers, for example.)

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).

                                    Randy.