Re: Generating PDFs with Ada

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

"Ludovic Brenta" <ludovic@ludovic-brenta.org> wrote in message 
news:9c34f2cf-cb2c-4433-a6f7-b4c19d842fee@t35g2000yqj.googlegroups.com...
> 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.

In hindsight, I might have as well. But part of the reason that I chose .rtf 
was because that was one of the few formats accepted by ISO for standards. 
.Doc being the other. (Please insert joke here about an International 
Standards Organization requiring documents in a propriatary, non standard 
format. Everyone else has. :-)

Interestingly, the *actual* format that the Ada standards have been 
submitted in has been .PDF. Although ISO recently tried to again insist on 
all documents being in their own closed template for Microsoft Office and in 
.Doc files. Which only works with US versions of Office. What's 
"International" about that?? Anyway, that has again been beaten back - the 
supposed reason that they wanted to do this is so that they could modify the 
standards if they needed to do so. But editors don't want ISO secretaries 
mucking with their standards! What a wonderful way to have a disaster 
(imagine deleting "not" from some text).

                                        Randy.