Re: Ada Reference Manual 2012 in info format

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

"Oliver Kleinke" <oliver.kleinke@c-01a.de> wrote in message 
news:20120511040710.52bbc3fd@vostro...
> Am Thu, 10 May 2012 11:11:25 +0100
> schrieb Stephen Leake <stephen_leake@stephe-leake.org>:
>
>> > A major problem of the formatter/RM sources is that they only
>> > provide partial semantic information about the contents, that IS
>> > 1995-style.
>>
>> What, exactly, is missing? Can you give an example?
>
> I'll provide one example:
>
> when ARM_Output.Small =>
>   if Indent = 0 then
>      return "Small";
>   elsif Indent = 1 then
>      return "Notes";
>   elsif Indent = 2 then
>      return "Annotations";
>
> As you can easily see the two style attributes 'Small' (paragraph/header
> style) and Indent (paragraph indentation) are used to determine the
> semantics of the paragraph's contents. So if you are a bright guy,
> you'll figure out what's bad about it.

I think you're confused. The ARM_Output packages only include formatting 
information (no semantics of any kind). Any semantics in those is an 
artifact of earlier versions (where all of the styles were named for their 
primary semantic use). For instance, in the above, all you are looking at is 
the names of the styles, which don't necessarily reflect in any way their 
semantic content - it's just a mnemomic device to make it easy to see if the 
right styles are applied.

You could rename these "Foobar1", "Foobar2", and "Foobar3" without making 
any difference in the output.

An earlier version of the formatter had a batch of completely ad-hoc styles, 
some including names like the above. (But even then, there was no intent 
that there was any semantic information involved.) When I pulled the indent 
out into a separate parameter (something I did relatively recently), I used 
some cases like the above so the underlying style names didn't need to 
change (I didn't relish trying to redo the mapping in the RTF, the HTML is 
much easier to change).

There's plenty of semantic information in the original markup, but 
approximately 0% makes it to any implementation of Arm_Output. If you want 
to preserve that, you probably will have to do the conversion at a higher 
level than Arm_Form does.

                                    Randy.