From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Thread: 103376,666bab5bfbdf30c2 X-Google-NewGroupId: yes X-Google-Attributes: gida07f3367d7,domainid0,public,usenet X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit Path: g2news2.google.com!news4.google.com!proxad.net!feeder1-2.proxad.net!news.in2p3.fr!in2p3.fr!news.ecp.fr!news.jacob-sparre.dk!pnx.dk!not-for-mail From: "Randy Brukardt" Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Generating PDFs with Ada Date: Wed, 12 Jan 2011 17:14:13 -0600 Organization: Jacob Sparre Andersen Message-ID: References: <4d2908c7$0$22120$742ec2ed@news.sonic.net> <9f23e50a-2c2c-4ccc-bd56-f6ffdc6c7ee7@37g2000prx.googlegroups.com> <82aaj73jsr.fsf@stephe-leake.org> NNTP-Posting-Host: static-69-95-181-76.mad.choiceone.net X-Trace: munin.nbi.dk 1294874055 23764 69.95.181.76 (12 Jan 2011 23:14:15 GMT) X-Complaints-To: news@jacob-sparre.dk NNTP-Posting-Date: Wed, 12 Jan 2011 23:14:15 +0000 (UTC) X-Priority: 3 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Newsreader: Microsoft Outlook Express 6.00.2900.5931 X-RFC2646: Format=Flowed; Original X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.00.2900.5931 Xref: g2news2.google.com comp.lang.ada:17378 Date: 2011-01-12T17:14:13-06:00 List-Id: "Maciej Sobczak" wrote in message news:a646191e-6671-4c3a-ab9a-ba20d4bba9bf@r29g2000yqj.googlegroups.com... >On Jan 11, 9:51 am, Stephen Leake 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.